Album Review: Watchhouse, ‘Rituals’
In 2021, Emily Frantz and Andrew Martin released their exquisite, self-titled, debut album, appearing as Watchhouse, after more than a decade of making music as Mandolin Orange. On their new album, Rituals, the duo weave their rich vocals through crystal clear layers of instrumentation, producing in the mosaic of their music the swirling patterns of familiar rituals that shape and sustain life and love. Like such rituals, Watchhouse’s emotionally resonant intimate songs brings deep comfort.
Slowly circling notes of Marlin’s electric tenor guitar introduce “Shape,” introducing the song’s melodic line that’s picked up by fiddles, piano and Frantz’s and Marlin’s vocals. The swirling instrumental variations on the song’s sonic theme evoke the eternal recurrence of the same that the song’s lyrics reveal. Ethereal harmonies and layers of crystalline picking create a dreamy soundscape on “All Around You,” an ode to home, which we often regret leaving and to which we look forward to returning, only to realize that it’s all around us. Ringing orchestral tones ebb and flow along a shuffling beat on the title track, an endless loop of sound and voice that mimics the repeated patterns of life and the ways they shape society. Frantz’s shimmering vocals on “Firelight,” floating over brightly reverberating guitar and mandolins, convey the pleasures that brightness—“talking in the firelight”—brings to relationships. The dirge-like “Endless Highway (pt. 1)” unfurls—like the never-ending road of tortured relationships, of societal chaos, of making music for money—slowly, eventually ascending into a repetitive circling of banjo strums as the song fades. The medley “Sway/Endless Highway (pt. 2)” opens with a Celtic-inflected lullaby-like meditation on the fears and hopes in the darkness that surrounds us before moving to the affirmations of the possibilities of life along an “endless highway.” The medley resembles, especially in the drums and fiddles of the outro of “Endless Highway (pt. 2),” Jackson Browne’s song “For Everyman.” The album closes with a comforting front porch picking song, “Patterns,” featuring spry mandolin picking and exquisite harmonies; it’s a paean to the comfort of the lifelong patterns in which we find sustenance—”ain’t it something, all the little patterns/that lead us home through our lives.”
Rituals builds on the strengths of Watchhouse’s first album, delivering ingenious lyrical and musical meditations that uncover the patterns, rituals, and shapes of our physical and psychic lives and to live into them in order to experience the beauty and richness of life.
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Rituals is available HERE.
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