Spiral in a Straight Line

If any musician has mastered the art of the work/life balance, it’s Jennifer Castle. Once embedded in Toronto’s fertile mid-2000s indie-rock scene but now ensconced a few hours outside the city in the Lake Erie coastal town of Port Stanley, Castle makes unhurried music at an unhurried pace, averaging a new album every four years and favoring short regional tours that keep her close to home and family. In the autumn of 2020, she dropped the perfect pandemic album in Monarch Season, a solo home recording on piano and acoustic guitar, infused with the sounds of the lapping waves and buzzing insects outside her door. But it was actually completed several months before COVID struck; every one of Castle’s records is a reflection of life at a remove. She writes the kind of songs that can only come when you give yourself the time and space to breathe: intensely introspective, steeped in her natural habitat, and loaded with the lyrical flights of fancy spawned by a wandering mind beholden to no particular schedule.

For Castle, that sense of intimacy remains even when she’s supported by a backing band that gives her music a country-rock kick. She’s retained her cottage-industry ethos even as her cult of well-known admirerers—Dan Bejar, Cass McCombs, and Fucked Up among them—continues to expand. But this past summer, we got our first real indication of just how well Castle’s music can translate to a more mainstream arena. In June, she debuted the dreamy, string-swept soul ballad “Blowing Kisses” on The Bear, where it soundtracked one of those moody montages of Carmy cookin’, smokin’, and thinkin’. Castle’s prestige-TV slot was more a product of an organic community connection than calculated careerism: Back in the mid-2000s, she used to wait tables at the same Toronto bistro where chef Matty Matheson—a.k.a. The Bear’s executive producer and primary source of comic relief—got his start in the kitchen. Judging by the number of enthusiastic Bear viewers descending upon the song’s YouTube comments section, it feels like Castle is on the cusp of becoming something more than your favorite musician’s favorite musician.

“Blowing Kisses” serves as the emotional anchor of Castle’s stunning seventh album, Camelot, which feels like the sort of bold breakthrough that her peers in U.S. Girls and the Weather Station respectively experienced with In a Poem Unlimited and Ignorance—i.e., the moment where a carefully guarded secret starts getting shouted from the rooftops. It’s an album that, on one hand, feels instantly familiar, presenting a summer-of-’73 simulacrum of folky reveries, Grand Ole Opry romps, and cinematic easy-listening ballads. But Castle’s counterintuitive melodies and idiosyncratic observations always remind us that we’re not listening to some golden-oldies radio station. Fittingly, for an album that takes its name from King Arthur’s folkloric kingdom, Camelot is an elaborate act of world-building, a psychic fortress where Castle weaves personal reflection and social commentary through astrology, mythology, and biblical allegory, rendering lived experience as fabulism and vice versa.

In Castle’s hands, the tenor of a song can shift in the span of a single lyric: The first words we hear her sing on the opening title track—“I’ve been sleeping in/The unfinished basement”—instantly transform a scene of Sunday-morning bliss into one of domestic distress. The song is spiritually positioned at the crossroads of Neil Young’s accessible and acerbic sides, with a melody that echoes the Harvest standard “Out on the Weekend” and a self-critical weariness (“Am I just pissing in the wind?”) that nods to On the Beach’s “Ambulance Blues.” But a slowly ascendent string arrangement—courtesy of returning collaborator Owen Pallett—subtly shifts the mood from tragic to triumphant. “These hearts can handle breaking,” Castle declares as the song achieves liftoff, a sentiment that feels just as empowering whether she’s talking about a reconciliation or separation.

“Camelot” doubles as a road map for Camelot as a whole, where a slow, steady immersion gives way to a lively mid-section en route to a calm comedown. While mesmerizing acoustic meditations like “Earthsong” adhere to the alone-at-the-microphone ethos of Monarch Season, the majority of Camelot sees Castle and long-time producer Jeff McMurrich once again corralling a cast of Toronto avant/indie veterans—guitarist Paul Mortimer, bassist Mike Smith, keyboardist Carl Didur, U.S. Girls/Cola drummer Evan Cartwright, vocalists Victoria Cheong and Isla Craig—to give her insular songcraft a widescreen treatment. But the rhinestone sparkle of 2018’s Angels of Death gives way to a nervier energy: “Lucky #8” enlists McCombs to add some pedal steel to a jangle-pop jaunt that sounds like some bygone ’80 college-rock standard, while the country-rock sway of “Mary Miracle” gets hotwired with buzzing analog synth tones like a honky-tonk Stereolab. Even the moodier turns exude a restless spirit, like “Louis,” where Castle’s call-outs to a dearly departed friend are answered with a frisky Gainbourgian groove that guides the song to its stormy symphonic peak.

As much as it’s consumed by philosophical questions about love, faith, and existence, Camelot finds its answers in physical release. On the celebratory centerpiece “Full Moon in Leo,” Castle lets loose like never before, fuelled by a rambunctious “Ramblin’ Man” rhythm, “Mrs. Robinson”-style doo doo doos, and surging saxophone from Antibalas’ Stuart Bogie. But what begins as a cheeky ode to doing household chores in your underwear builds into a fierce declaration of independence: “I get tired of sending my songs off and waiting for some foreign agent to say let’s make bank,” she sings with gospel gusto, before delivering her oath: “I pledge my allegiance to this moment between us/Can you feel me?” Even as her sound and reach continues to expand, Jennifer Castle is still moving through the world at her own pace and on her own terms, still approaching each song as an opportunity for a one-on-one conversation.