Order and Disorder

Two immersive new Triangle plumb the depths of family, society, and existential anxieties.

BY JORDAN LAWRENCE AND BRIAN HOWE music@indyweek.com

existential anxieties with more prescient concerns about the state of our world and nation.

“O little child / You will never know a world / That lets you forget / What you’ve been,” Bickford intones on “Born Outside,” contemplating the digital footprints that cling to us in this modern age as acoustic guitar and organ slink before blossoming into a patient full-band rollick. “When I was a boy / I really thought I would be / Relieved to find out / How the story ends.”

Shortly thereafter, Bickford laments that he lived “to see a demagogue / finally get the keys to the United States” and that “we had this coming.”

Scivic Rivers is filled with such verses that poignantly weigh near-term concerns of family and society against the arc of time and history.

“The last thing I want to do / Is file another field piece / About what it means / To raise a human being.”

These words start the last song on the first album by Scivic Rivers (and the seventh album from deep-thinking Durham songwriter Randy Bickford, who adopted the moniker after releasing two 2010s albums as Brice Randall Bickford and a handful before that as the Strugglers).

With all due respect: the album very much is a field piece about raising a human being—but it’s also much more than that. Scivic Rivers connects the threads of a songwriter becoming a father as he loses his own father to lung cancer, mulling the amount to which we grow with each generation against the way our patterns can often seem to just go on repeating—“a child is always on the way” is the persistent refrain of “Instruction After the Fact,” the aforementioned closer.

Set to folk-rock that runs the gamut from epic and somber to energetic and danceable (captured with immersive clarity with help from local producer Scott Solter), Bickford’s latest connects these looming

“Shenandoah Granite” observes, “You can be scared / And bored at the same time / For the civilized / It’s hard to feel otherwise.”

The opening “High Season” finds Bickford thinking about how “The sea is close / As close as you can get to eternity / It goes on / Churning bodies” as he lies sprawled out on the beach with “other bored voices” around him.

Appraising a newly built overpass “with the boy as a lens” on “Blood Vessel,” he notes with a grave double meaning that you can take the interstate “all the way / To the end of the West.”

The music on those songs remains elegantly nervy and elemental even as it trips through varying shades of rock, Americana, and disco.

Bound by the yearning of Bickford’s honeyed and hypnotic baritone, Scivic Rivers ponders questions that are big, unknowable, and universal with arrangements that are consistently immersive and engaging. This is an album that doesn’t pretend to have the answers, but it might make you feel less alone. —J.L.

In many ways, The Veldt is a spot-on reincarnation of a classic psychedelic rock band. They’re named after a sci-fi story by Ray Bradbury. They favor long album titles that resemble the lysergic musings of Terence McKenna. Their pedalboards overfloweth, turning plain old electric guitar signals into a celestial roar.

At the same time, you would never mistake them for a period artifact or even a simple pastiche. After all, few classic psych-rock records have such acute realworld song titles as “Slave Ship Serenade” and “Requiem for Emmett Till,” and fewer still contain Sneaker Pimps–style downtempo electronics, a sky-stomping cover of Curtis Mayfield’s “Check Out Your Mind,” or an interpolation of the haunting hook from Mobb Deep’s “Get Away.”

Yet all of this can be found on The Veldt’s first full-length album since they reformed circa 2016. It follows a string of rejuvenated EPs from twin brothers Daniel and Danny Chavis, who grew up in Raleigh, fused dream-pop and soul in the golden age of Chapel Hill indie, and went on to have a major-label adventure in New York that bequeathed us the 1994 classic Afrodisiac, which Pitchfork enshrined as one of the 50 best shoegaze records of all time.

Now with bassist and programmer Nakao Hayato, keyboardist Micah Gaugh, and drummer Dan Milligan, Daniel’s soaring yet desolate singing and chopping rhythm guitar and Danny’s combustible leads are in fine form, captured in a potent recording that balances foursquare brawn and baroque detail. The heaviest songs have the glazed power of neo-psych bands like The Jesus and Mary Chaim, but it’s tempered by the furtive catchiness of Echo and the Bunnymen and activated by the revolutionary energy of Parliament.

And check out those two alt-rock beauties in the middle, “Sweeter” and “Walk with the Spirits”—reminders of how cunningly The Veldt always toyed with mainstream success even while buffeting it with their contrarian conviction. Their references may be classic and global, but these are true American originals. —B.H. W

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