DOWNLOAD: Jesse Kivel - Content • Instrumentals

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Content 1. Endless 2. LA Story 3. Behaving Badly 4. Dance Hall 5. The Great Divide Written by Jesse Kivel Produced by Jeffrey Brodsky

 

BIOGRAPHY:

-words by Maeve O’Regan

Jesse Kivel’s Life and Death at Party Rock—elemental in sound and sentiment, tempo and timelessness—is an unadorned exploration of fatherhood, partnership, and life in rural Maine.Setting layered electronic sounds aside, Kivel embraces the familiar with thrumming guitar, light horns, keys, and harmonica. Through nine pastorales we sit with him on a ridge, in the grass, puzzling together the pieces of a dismantled self.   

Party Rock, a jumping rock on the seaside, serves as a stolid witness to both a millennia of tides and the vanitas of our brief and fragile lives. With the rock as the scale to mark geologic time alongside our own, “It’s a comedy / it’s a tragedy” Kivel reminds us. 

It is not surprising that with fatherhood comes a new consideration of time and mortality. In “Overgrown Ocean,” imagining meeting death by plane crash, Kivel reveals “And I found out, everything, everything I needed to know and everything I was and everything I is.” This moment, this place, this life: this is it. 

“Nepenthe,” named for the impossible potion to relieve one of grief and sorrow, brings us a perspective that comes from exiting youth. The space once reserved for the scaffolding of a constructed Self is surrendered to the truth that exists beyond the Self — mothers, partners, children, and choices that shape us. To accept these things as inseparable is the true Nepenthe. 

For each of these moments of knowing, Kivel also submits to the vast unknown throughout the album. Each piece includes forgiveness and surrender. Even as Life and Death at Party Rock closes with the instrumental “Hunting with Sean,” a dreamscape of spare piano, we sense this return to the vulnerable, child-like space of wonder. We’re back in the grass where we started. If we look closely enough, can we see the changes?

This album was produced by Joey Genetti. Guest performers include Sam Wilkes, Joseph Shabason, Kacey Johansing, Dylan Day and Matt Popieluch.

Album Art & Photos: (Photos by David Kitz. Design by James Anderson. Cover art courtesy of )