Written by: Dave Cantrell

Connections in this music game can – and most of the time are – fleeting, elliptic, and random to a point that (seeing as little else can explain it) suggests ancient runes may have had a mystic hand in determining who meets who and when. Here’s an example. Up until ten months ago I lived in the Portland area and had done so since 1989. Over time, and via that tangle of fortuitous circumstance suggested above, I became kind of enmeshed in the music scene there to a point where the proverbial one thing led to the proverbial another and by 2010 or so I’d not only experienced first-hand the many waves of the Portlandian musical fervor that had swept through town over the previous couple decades, spawning a scene that was both grittily organic and, best of all, relatively unpretentious, most every band and artist supportive of other bands and artists and no one – or at least very few – believing themselves above it all (as a for instance, I recall Elliott Smith in the early aughts working behind the counter at a then-renowned indie/punk record store on West Burnside, doing a double take that he took pretty much in stride) but soon launched a darkwave radio show on then-upstart FM radio station XRAY fm (Songs From Under the Floorboard) which in turn led to organizing shows and festivals etc etc. But really that’s all meaningless (if substantiating) noise backdropping my main point: inside that maelstrom one tended to run in to all manners of curious characters and among them, for me, was Dagger Zine founder Tim Hinely, an affable, knowledgeable-as-fck, unassuming but sly music addict (like all of us) that somehow – the details are their usual hazy – introduced me to Ed Mazzucco and his wife Laura Watling who had founded and ran the local-gone-national label Shelflife that more or less specialized in featuring a slew of bands that, in a way, formed an, umm, undersung pop league of the witty, the literate, the lively and not infrequently shoegaze-touched that, kind of against the odds, rivaled those historically legendary scenes from Oxford, Glasgow, Liverpool, you name it, the only difference here being that they didn’t all reside in the same city but on the same label. And though, rather curiously, I wasn’t immediately aware that the label that Ed and Laura founded was, as is so often the case, a vehicle for them to release their own music under the pop-perfect name Tears Run Rings, once I heard their material it was like some last magic puzzle piece had fallen into place, their sound so redolent of the dreamgaze ethos as to be its exemplar, its designer, or at the very least among its foremost practitioners. Thus does the task of bringing you an advance preview of Tears Runs Rings’ newest album Everything in the End (bloody terrific title, by the way), along with a track-by-track rundown from the band themselves (which, indispensably, includes the essential and gifted work of Matthew Bice on vox and guitar and Dwayne Palasek’s almost eerily in-the-pocket drumming) prove to be not a task at all but an incontestable joy, not a state of mind any of us can take for granted these days and believe me, I am most grateful. So, as they say, without further ado, we present you with the spanking brand new album from easily one of the finest dreampop bands that have ever been granted that title (and definitely, definitely read that track-by-track below while listening to the preview; enlightening, gratifying and in some subtle way, life-affirming…)