ALL THINGS MUSIC
PAGE 4 • GO! MAGAZINE
Thursday, april 29, 2021 • ThE BullETiN
Bandcampin’: Good stuff for your ears
BY BEN SALMON • For The Bulletin
B
andcamp is an online music platform used largely by independent artists and record labels to stream songs and sell merchandise. It’s
also a vibrant virtual community teeming with interesting sounds just waiting to be discovered. Each week, I’ll highlight three releases
available on the site that are well worth your time and attention. If you find something you dig, please consider supporting the artist with
a purchase.
ALICE CLARK
WILD PINK
RAISING HOLY SPARKS
“Alice Clark”
“A Billion Little Lights”
“Search for the Vanished Heaven”
History is littered with artists who left the music
industry after making great records that were largely
ignored by listeners. Alice Clark fits the bill. Born in
New York City, the little-known soul singer recorded
two singles and one excellent full-length album, pro-
duced by Bob Shad for the Mainstream Records label
in 1972.
Blessed with a strong and versatile voice and
backed by a band of top-shelf session players (includ-
ing drummer Bernard Purdie and guitarist Cornell
Dupree), Clark spends these 10 tracks infusing sto-
ries of love, loss and life with the kind of authentic
emotion that made other singers superstars. It didn’t
work out for Clark, though, who retired after the re-
lease of her self-titled debut and died in 2004. A debt
of gratitude, then, to Parisian label We Want Sounds,
which unearthed this lost soul classic and reissued it
in 2019, making it widely available for the first time in
decades.
New York-based singer-songwriter John Ross has
quietly become one of indie rock’s great, underappre-
ciated tunesmiths over the past few years.
He records under the name Wild Pink, and his new
album “A Billion Little Lights” is yet another collec-
tion of softly focused songs that shimmer and sigh,
beautifully and wearily.
Wild Pink’s music sits at the intersection of a num-
ber of different sounds and styles: the earnest pop-
rock of Death Cab for Cutie, swooping slide gui-
tars for a healthy dose of twang, the steady thrum of
nu-classic rockers The War on Drugs, the warm nos-
talgia of buzzing synthesizers and so on. The songs
on “A Billion Little Lights” are at once immediately
likable and complex enough to reveal layers upon re-
peated listens.
They remind me of The National in this way, and
you like The National, right? You will also like Wild
Pink.
With a name like that and four tracks running 23
minutes long each, you can probably guess what’s
happening here: Lots of weirdness, with an emphasis
on the words “lots” and “weirdness,” (no offense to
the word “of”). Released in 2017 on the terrific Seat-
tle-based label Eiderdown Records, “Search for the
Vanished Heaven” comprises nearly 100 minutes of,
according to the Bandcamp description, “prog gno-
sis, lunar devotionals, ancient-future rituals & thanks
& prayers to the resident spirits, who know of no
borders save those liminal ones we may sometimes
glimpse.” I hear strange tones and far-out drones from
zones both cosmic and terrestrial, plus the occasional
folk melody, synth loop, psych freakout and spo-
ken-word passage. This one’s for the adventurous lis-
tener with patience to spare.
e e
Ben Salmon is a Bend-based music journalist and host of Left Of The
Dial, which airs 8-10 p.m. Thursdays on KPOV, 88.9 FM and streams at
kpov.org. You can find him on Bandcamp and Twitter at @bcsalmon.
Wild Pink’s music sits at the intersection of a number of different sounds and styles: the
earnest pop-rock of Death Cab for Cutie, swooping slide guitars for a healthy dose of twang,
the steady thrum of nu-classic rockers The War on Drugs, the warm nostalgia of buzzing
synthesizers and so on. The songs on “A Billion Little Lights” are at once immediately
likeable and complex enough to reveal layers upon repeated listens.