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.
Photo by Trent Wayne
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.