Sinai Vessel Sings Again

It was Caleb Cordes’s first night off from tour. In October 2021, he was on drumming duties for Katy Kirby’s band, traveling across the East Coast as the openers for Waxahatchee. Four of the 10 shows during Cordes’s stint on drums were in New York City. But on the 14th, Cordes played a DIY show with Sinai Vessel, his emo-turned-indie-folk project, in a Lower East Side basement. In a practice space under a barbershop, Cordes borrowed a nylon guitar to showcase a handful of new songs he had written during the pandemic, mostly eschewing ones from Sinai Vessel’s 2020 triumph Ground Aswim. At the show, Cordes described one song as being about a “wealth gap relationship,” while another titled “Birthday” was a lovely, meandering story of the day that he turned 21. Almost three years later, those songs rest at the center of Sinai Vessel’s masterful fourth album I SING, where Cordes’s anxieties about his platonic, familial and romantic relationships, his economic standing and the value of being a musician today are translated into an overwhelming array of straightforward, funny and heart-wrenching songs.

Sinai Vessel is best described as whatever music Caleb Cordes is making, which means Sinai Vessel has worn many different hats. For a period of time, Sinai Vessel was a three-piece band, charging ahead with Cordes’s howled vocals, crunchy electric guitars and broad angst on 2017’s Brokenlegged. It was a critical breakthrough, so naturally Cordes disassembled the band, moved to Nashville in 2019 and decided to do a sonic 180. On 2020’s Ground Aswim, Sinai Vessel was reintroduced as an indie folk project that had more in common with the sparse narratives of Allegra Krieger than the dense emo of the Hotelier. “It’s always been whatever my impulse leads me to do,” explains Cordes. “Because that’s been the precedent, it’s hard for me to change it.” Cordes started Sinai Vessel at 16, and the project remains the direct extension of his musical whims and emotional insights.

I SING retains the stripped back sound of Ground Aswim, trafficking in plucked acoustic guitars, muted drum grooves and melodic, active basslines to support Cordes’s measured, clear lyricism. “I feel like this record is very much in the Ground Aswim universe and everything I make will be in that universe from this point forward,” he says. “Basically, I wanted to kind of do one better.” But I SING has a sharpness, seen most explicitly on the title-track’s mounting tension or “Country Mile,” which explodes with a snarling, upbeat guitar part to soundtrack Cordes’s frustration about centering your life around making music.

After hearing that Cordes and producer Bennett Littlejohn (Hovvdy, claire rousay) prioritized following their instincts in the studio, these jagged moments are a little less surprising. “I was maybe less concerned with aiming for a specific sound than ever before,” says Cordes. “I felt like we were just really working through this process with our ears and not so much within an ear to reference points. Just sort of seeing what came out of that room and what we were able to kind of conjure up.” Recorded mostly over six days in October 2022 with Littlejohn on bass and Andrew Stevens on drums, I SING’s steady singer-songwriter numbers, patient rockers and haunting folk songs sit side by side comfortably.

But Cordes isn’t coasting on the atmosphere of I SING. There are hooks here in healthy measure—whether that’s the “ha ha ha” on the alt-country shuffle of “Laughing,” the sing-along of “I’ll do anything” on “$2 Million” or the muddled, rocking defeat of “How”—but Cordes has rarely been a better lyricist, articulating uncertainty and alienation from angles you’d hardly expect. Those narratives are paired with little images that push I Sing into greatness: bowls of fruit on kitchen islands, checking credit scores at house shows, quotes from Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion. Moments of relief are few and far between here, so Cordes knows that it’s critical to puncture that hopelessness with comedy. On the aimless panic of “Laughing,” he sings “Reading the fine print on billboards / Why do they put fine print on billboards?” like he is muttering it to himself while driving down the highway.

A pervasive discomfort wraps itself around Cordes’s songs, appearing in his friendships on “Best Witness” and “Window Blue,” enveloping “cardinal sin of not being born to rich parents” on “Laughing,” or in how Cordes engages with his siblings on “Younger Brother.” So much of I SING revels in precariousness, so it’s fitting that “Younger Brother” concludes this record with a shot in the arm for Cordes, reinforcing that he has to take action if he wants anything to improve. “If you want to make a change in your life, you’re going to have to do it,” he elaborates. “The Earth is not going to open up and swallow you or make the decision for you. If you want anything to be different, you have to do it. It’s maybe the secret moral of the record. Even as I’m feeling all this pain [and] this confusion, the only thing that I can do to change my own life is to change my actions and greet some of these things head on.” As the album concludes with the strummed acoustic guitars and winding melodies on “Younger Brother,” Cordes is forced to make a move, even if he wishes the path were more evident.

Though Cordes knows his circumstances can change, his gift as a songwriter is often pitted against the necessities of making rent. Economic uncertainty looms over I SING like a ghost, infecting romances (“Challenger”), being a touring musician (“Country Mile”) and even biking around your city (“Laughing”). “Whenever the pandemic happened, I became very keenly aware that if I were to get really substantially sick, or something was to go wrong, or I wasn’t able to find work, I was just fucked in a way that a lot of my peers weren’t,” Cordes explains. That consistent, small-scale panic about not having a safety net can feel like an unstoppable force. “I had never developed anything else in my life besides making music, which made me feel really defenseless.” That pathos becomes crushing on “$2 Million,” where Cordes is invited into an air-conditioned, shiny model home. Over electric piano chords and a tempting, lurching groove, the song climaxes with Cordes begging the homeowner “please just let me stay” over and over again, as the album’s most unexpected instrumental rises.

“I lived in a neighborhood that was getting so radically and just brazenly developed. It happens all over the United States but the development that happens in Nashville is a bit more cruel than other places I’ve experienced. There’s really no rhyme or reason to it,” Cordes shares. It shouldn’t come as a shock that Cordes moved back to his home state of North Carolina in 2021, settling down in Asheville. But living in Nashville greatly shaped this record, which documents why anyone without a trust fund has reasonable pessimism. “I lived in a neighborhood pretty close to downtown Nashville called Wedgewood Houston where I could walk to work. I walked to work past a row of single family homes, three right next to each other, in the morning to go to work. Then I walked past them later that day and they were all gone.”

It can become easy to focus on what you lack. That kind of unfulfilled, unceasing desire is one of Cordes’s pet subjects. He expressed it best on 2020’s “Shameplant,” where a tripping drum part and a plucking, percussive guitar underlined his lyrics about “The part of me that’s always wondering / What else I could get for what I’ve got.” Those feelings return on “Best Witness,” one of I SING’s melancholic, chilly songs where Cordes searches for the support of friends and loved ones, before that desire for something or someone better pokes its head again: “When you’ve seen how good it gets / What isn’t and what cannot be won’t let me forget.” But Cordes insists that that yearning can be a hopeful emotion, not just an impediment to satisfaction. “I use this term not in a very positive way but more in terms of expressing a pathology or a fault in the way that my brain works, but I definitely am a romantic,” he contends. “A lot of the impulse to write music and imagine worlds and sort of visualize and manifest what could be comes from that.” That compulsion seems to be the reason why we have I SING, another collection of Cordes’s extraordinary, grounded indie folk songs. If passivity, uncertainty and wanting better for yourself appear all over Sinai Vessel’s output, then music is one way that Cordes knows how to improve things.

“There’s so many people in the world that can have all of the trappings of a good life except for the means by which to connect to the world,” he says. “I have music, by which I can make hundreds of friends—by which I can show my inner world and all of its complicated nastiness and all of its earnest beauty and all of the things I like. I can wrap them all up in a package and give them to somebody.”

I SING is out this Friday via Keeled Scales.

Ethan Beck is a writer from Pittsburgh who lives in Brooklyn. His work can be found at Bandcamp Daily, Paste Magazine, Washington Square News and others.

Looking Straight At It: Sinai Vessel Sings Again

After 2020’s Ground Aswim, Caleb Cordes wasn’t certain what role—if any—music should have in his life. Four years later, his long-standing indie rock project is back with I SING, their finest, steadiest album to date.