Libby Rodenbough - Between the Blades (2023) [gnodde]
Alternative, folk, folk-pop, indie-folk, singer-songwriter
Libby Rodenbough is from Greensboro, North Carolina, and has played with the four-piece folk band Mipso for more than a decade. Her debut album as a solo artist, Spectacle of Love—an intimate, inventive chronicle of heartache and abjection—was released in 2020; she has also built up numerous collaborations in the tight-knit North Carolina music scene. Lyrical sleights of hand and thoughtful, twinging references tunnel beneath the surface of Between the Blades, which Rodenbough recorded at Bedtown Lakehouse in Virginia with a close group of friends and collaborators in early 2022.
Besides Bingham and Khoujinian’s work as co-producers and accompanists (Koujinian on electric guitar, keys, and synthesizers; Bingham on bass, cello, keys, and synthesizers), Rodenbough also enlisted a sterling cohort of other North Carolina musicians: Jay Hammond (guitars), Kate Rhudy (backing vocals), Matt Douglas (horns), Anna Jacobson (French horn), and Will Van Horn (pedal steel). Alli Rogers mastered the album.
Less than a year before the recording session, Rodenbough’s mother passed away at the age of 65. Between the Blades isn’t exactly an album about grief—that’s a tall order—but at the time of that lake weekend, other members of the group were also reckoning with death and so, between takes, a lilting, capacious kind of grief seeps in. The songs were intentionally all recorded in the same room—occasionally, as in “Making Light,” under a quilt in order to isolate the vocals, at other times textured with off-the-cuff experiment; the sound of the outdoors bleeding into microphones—giving the album a live yet intimate feel.
Tracks:
01 - Another World
02 - Make Light
03 - Sleeping Hard
04 - Easier to Run
05 - Astrology
06 - Topography
07 - Which Way (Tactical Khakis)
08 - Waking World
All in MP3 @ 320kbps