Meditative EP Dwells Excellently in Neo-Folk

Take a guitar, a cajon, a mandolin and three dudes from Columbia, MD, who’ve been friends since high school, toss them in a room and if you stayed, they’d probably be playing music three hours later and you’d love it! This lengthy EP from Splendor Tree is a collection of songs Austin Sebek, Ben Woo, and Caleb Woo have recorded on their musical journey and recently released as a whole. What I’ve Been Looking For, encapsulates neo folk in a lazy river journey way. This is the sort of album that you’d want to hang out with while reclining on a pastoral landscape or a calm sea shore.

The vocals are a mix of haunting, earnest introspection that are almost spoken like a prayer, while the percussion gently urges in the listener into listening without drifting too far into sleep. Lyrically, these songs are devotional in nature, and excellently woven together in a tapestry that is intelligent and intriguing. Meditative and alluring, this is an excellent collection, beginning with “What I’ve Been Looking For,” moving into a quiet “Strength,” reaching an urgent undercurrent of fervor with “How Beautiful” and drifting over an “Ocean” till ending at a peaceful “Home.”

Often times, when an album says it was recorded in basements and self recorded, usually there’s an expectation that the quality is going to sound a little rough around the edges and unevenly mixed. If they hadn’t explicitly stated that these tracks were recorded in basements, I would have expected that the recordings were done in a studio and mixed by someone who’s been doing this for a lengthy while. This collection sounds so good. Let me type that again, it sounds so good.

Currently, Splendor Tree has What I’ve Been Looking For available for download on noisetrade for donation. Give them a like if you are on Facebook, and check out their website after you download it!