Lomelda

Lomelda is Hannah Read's musical project. In swampy, sweaty, Silsbee, TX, she first formed the band with her high school best friends. Throughout the next decade, Lomelda mad a habit out of stretching to fit new friendships and shrinking down to solo strummings. Four albums and a never-the-same live show chronicle these shifts in shape and sound.

Lomelda's fifth album is called Hannah. The album stretches and shrinks into many of Lomelda's different forms, from expansive "Wonder" and rock band "Reach" to meandering "Stranger Sat By Me" and finger picking "It's Infinite." Through this range of moods, Hannah sings stories of strangers, suns, dogs, moms, brothers, favorite bands, "oh god!"s and big shots as well as herself, by name. She rejoices and reviles her god-given name and then flips it around to name herself Hannah once again. It is an album of confession and transformation made ultimately singable.

Tomberlin is Sarah Beth Tomberlin, a pastor’s kid born in Florida, raised in rural Illinois. She wrote the majority of her debut, At Weddings (2018), while living at home. For a while after leaving home and church, she lived in Louisville, Kentucky. She worked a day job and kept writing songs. She posted some of these songs to Bandcamp, which led to her signing a record deal with Saddle Creek. It all happened fast: Less than a year after her first live show, she performed on Jimmy Kimmel and she ended up moving to L.A. which is where she wrote Projections (2020), her EP followup to At Weddings.

During the pandemic, Sarah Beth was all over the place, physically and mentally. Louisville. Los Angeles. Back home in Illinois for a bit. Brooklyn, where she’s now settled, she says. Brooklyn is also where her new album i don’t know who needs to hear this… was recorded, at Figure 8 studios over the course of two weeks, with producer and engineer Phil Weinrobe (who played a variety of instruments on the collection), and later mastered by Josh Bonati, also in Brooklyn.

“The theme of the record,” she explains, “is to examine, hold space, make an altar for the feelings.” Hold space: Tomberlin’s songs do it literally, making it heard space. Her full-length debut, At Weddings, was widely praised for the sparsity and delicacy of its instrumentation, especially in contrast with the emotional heft of her lyrics.

Here, the space feels larger and holier, built to echo. Pedal steel. Old acoustic guitars, freshly plucked. A drifting synthesizer. Chill, brushy percussion. Ambient, expansive clarinet and saxophone. Aleatory piano trills, a lot of piddling with the occasional splash. The looseness and wideness of the arrangements conveys a tender regard for their parts, as though each arpeggio, loop, scratch is a found shell or feather in the hand. Then there is the instrument of her voice, which has the endearing quality of being perfectly tuned but reluctantly played. “I’m not a singer,” she sings on “idkwntht.” “I’m just someone who’s guilty.”