New York City artist Oropendola released her new album Swimming. Along with the album is a new music video for the song Pyre. This follows the singles Palace of Sunflowers and Swimming.
As a singer-songwriter, Joanna writes, records, and performs her lyrical chamber-pop music under the moniker Oropendola, a tropical bird whose name translates to “golden pendulum.” Joanna is also a touring member of the art-pop band Half Waif and has played keys and sung with many other artists.
There is a striking intimacy throughout Swimming, the sophomore album from Oropendola. With unwavering reflection and resolve, it rejects what keeps us contained and disconnected, clawing toward something wilder.
In contrast with Waiting for the Sky to Speak, Oropendola’s kaleidoscopic chamber-pop debut, Swimming is foundationally a piano-vocal record. Co-produced with Zubin Hensler (Half Waif, Westerlies, Twig Twig), the album captures Schubert’s penchant and reverence for unfettered live performance. It was recorded as multiple solo sets in her childhood basement, on the same Steinway upright she grew up playing. Schubert’s arrangements feature close collaborators/bandmates Elizabeth LoPiccolo and Gabby Sherba, whose vocalizations recall the bold, idiosyncratic energy of The Roches. Instrumentation oscillates between jagged and lush, with LoPiccolo on flute, Hensler on synths and electric bass, and Schubert sprinkling in touches of toy piano, harpsicle, and cello.
The album opens with the title track, “Swimming,” an emotional and brutally honest piece about never having written a love song, and struggles around openly talking about loneliness. Soft yet gripping vocals are paired with a subtle and deeply captivating piano line. The use of the word “Swimming” may represent how Oropendola copes with her loneliness, adrift while moving away from the past.
Following this track comes “Moss Covered Alder Tree,” a beautifully composed song with harmonic melodies and spacious background vocals that paint the vivid picture of a woman singing by a moss-covered alder tree, conjuring a feeling of serenity.
The fifth track on the album is titled “Pyre,” a song about human connection and what it ignites deep within people. The music video by Jackie West, filmed on an old Sony Handycam, explores love and desire as wide-eyed rebirths and accelerated reckonings with people’s vibrant, fragile mortality. Reading Caitlin Doughty’s “From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death,” Oropendola was struck by the image of the funeral pyre.
The closing song of the album is “Swelled Roses, Red Balloons,” a song in which Oropendola compares herself and her traits to another, likely her partner. The track implements multiple vocalists layered on top of each other and singing the same lyrics, creating the illusion that the listener is caught in between this confrontation.
Conjuring the raw incisiveness of Fiona Apple and the oddball playfulness of Regina Spektor, Schubert digs deep and has a grand time doing so. The seven songs of Swimming paint vivid scenes: piercing confessions, woozy barroom ballads, improvised woodland fantasies. Desire Keeps Me Company juxtaposes sumptuous imagery with crass mundanity. Pyre – inspired by a book about death practices – blazes with pulsing synth and syncopated speak-sing. The Baroquian odyssey Moss Covered Alder Tree soars towards collective catharsis.
To listen to Swimming and learn more about Oropendola, click here.
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