rainfield

Rainfield is the solo alias of Los Angeles-based musician Joseph Rainfield Lewis. For the better part of the last decade, he's kept a veiled profile between the hill country of his native Central Texas and New York. His releases have been concentrated in tone and economical in length, mostly consisting of singles and EPs. Although sparse, each has discovered a new iteration of a broader sound. While his live performances have been rare, he's shared bills with Suzy Sheer, Rockie Rode, Alana Markel, and Xaviersobased. Whether through his collaborations with Organ Tapes and Reserv, or as one half of the beloved Black Tie Event, pop has been for him an oblique ideal.

Here, these discrete visions arc toward one another. A Lighter Sentence is his debut album. Over its eight songs, Rainfield finds a place where private listening opens onto the world. These are portable songs that draw the same breath from the open country — maybe the windblown hills of Texas, great clearings of clouds — as from hours spent in small corners of the internet. It's music for headphones in a city, car speakers in the country.

Solitude figures here; so do grace and melodrama. Rainfield's music has always existed between opposing poetics. A Lighter Sentence finds him now surrendering to them in equal measure. A kind of Southwestern gothic forms, heartworn and sepia-toned, over the coiled shine of his guitar and the immediacy of the drums — the threshold of indie and trap, emo and country. Throughout the album, references are suggested, though Rainfield prefers something more romantic and understated to indulgence. Restraint ultimately frames the album's emotional release. Passages of voice, drum, and acoustic guitar give way to sudden moments of depth and clarity — the trails and afterglow of a chorus.