Sylvan Esso's new album is a winsome pairing of improv and pop

I wanted to convey: how accidental most of history is. None of it is predetermined. None of it. Climate forces so much of it.”

Byrne laughs as she sheepishly acknowledges the similarity between her upcoming adventures and her imagining of our world’s future. “I don’t want to be L. Ron Hubbard, bringing an actual religion into existence,” she says, “but I can’t say that writing The Actual Star has not been influential on this decision.”

That decision, to become an “itinerant writer,” was partly fueled by frustration with shrinking COVID precautions and a lack of affordable health care. “I need to find a place that has a baseline expectation of communal care already,” she says. It was also partly an homage to her mother, who spent years looking through atlases and dreaming of travel. Byrne’s own inherent restlessness, which friends attribute to her Cancer sun, Sagittarius moon, and Taurus rising astrological signs, also played a part. But Byrne says the decision was largely forced by the changing climate of life in Durham.

In Durham County, which is tied with Wake as the third-most-expensive county in the state, the median home prices have risen by nearly 30 percent in the last year, while available housing has declined by almost 12 percent. Rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Durham proper rose by nearly 40 percent in 2021, higher than Raleigh’s 21 percent rise for the same period.

Durham establishments Arcana, Copa, and Cocoa Cinnamon and Open Eye Café in Carrboro all earned a nod in The Actual Star’s acknowledgments. “There’s nowhere in Durham I feel like I haven’t worked on it,” Byrne says. But the numbers are hard to deny. Right before the pandemic hit, Byrne was looking at either moving downtown or buying a house in East Durham, while helping run a campaign advocating for increased funding for the arts. Today, those same houses are out of reach, and she’s too burned out to go back to the Durham City Council.

After the closing of the Carrack in 2019, Byrne began organizing artists to speak to the Durham City Council at every meeting. Three of those speakers—Byrne, Marshall Botvinick, and Akiva Fox—created a proposal asking for $1,325,750 “to create a direct granting program for arts organizations and individual artists.” Unfortunately, the council discussed it in February 2020. Any positive momentum was quickly crushed by the urgency of fixing the carbon monoxide leaks at McDougald Terrace and the onset of COVID-19.

Now, Byrne says, she’s just too tired to start the process over again. “Nobody with power cares,” she says. “Nobody with real power cares that we came very close to getting some money for even just the start of an artists funding program. It just went away and the window closed.”

Byrne first moved to Durham in 2005 after a horrible experience in graduate school at MIT. She’d thought she wanted to be an astronaut for years, but her time in grad school revealed she really wanted to be a writer. “Why can’t I just allow myself to do what actually gives me pleasure?” she asked herself. And where is a 24-year-old aspiring writer going to go? A free room in her sister’s dorm in Durham seemed the safest choice. “My oldest sister, Julie, was a professor-in-residence at Duke in religion, so she had a whole apartment on the ground floor of one of the East Campus dorms,” Byrne says.

From that dorm room, Byrne began to find her first artistic home within Durham’s theater community. She fondly recalls putting on shows in condemned garages and in the middle of the street around Rigsbee and Foster Streets. “We were the ones who were making [Durham] cool,” Byrne says. “Manbites Dog [Theater] did three of my plays, and now I can’t even walk down that street because the developers are gouging my former life out of the earth. It’s so depressing.”

But Byrne, who says she’ll always be thankful to Durham for facilitating her artistic development, acknowledges that indulging her disappointment is a privilege. “I can afford to feel very pessimistic about it because I’m leaving,” she says. “There are still people in Durham who are pushing very hard and advocating, so I don’t want to take that hope away from other people.”

She’s tried to manufacture it. “I keep asking myself, like, ‘Well, why don’t you just do it? Why don’t you just round up your friends and do act 2 of Romeo and Juliet on Rigsbee?’” she says. “One of the things about capitalism and poverty is just that it keeps you ground down constantly, so that you have so little energy …. And those forces have just taken over in Durham.”

With a third novel drafted and her next project, a travel memoir, in mind, Byrne is turning the rest of her energies to writing and travel, seeking community with a sense of possibility on the road. W

MUSIC SYLVAN ESSO: NO RULES SANDY [Loma Vista, August 12, 2022] | HHHH

Darker Rooms

No Rules Sandy is a winsome pairing of improvisation and earworm pop.

BY LINNIE GREENE backtalk@indyweek.com

Since their self-titled debut in 2014, Sylvan Esso has delivered a steady stream of folksy, singsong melodies backed by pulsing electronica, songs that sound as at home in an Anthropologie dressing room as they do in a dark bar after midnight. Amelia Meath’s guileless vocals meet Nick Sanborn’s tremoring, eddying synth, and it sounds like flirtation, the easy partnership of two genres tucking into bed together. On No Rules Sandy, the group’s latest, they forgo some of this coziness for discovery, and the result is revivifying, letting air into the rooms where they’ve produced the world’s most palatable, tasteful dance music.

Opener “Moving” sets the tone, a skittering ode to compensatory numbness. Meath’s flat, confessional style matches the song’s content, in which she asks, “How can I be moved / When everything is moving?” It’s the less pointed counterpart of 2016’s “Radio,” trading a searing critique of sex and consumption for anxiety and anhedonia, an emotional glitch that matches its glitchy sound.

This discomfort is, counterintuitively, Sylvan Esso’s most welcome departure. Where previous albums have been winsome or playful, No Rules Sandy feels a little more jagged, carries more dirt under its fingernails. That leaves room for discovery upon repeat listens, less polish and more process. “Your Reality,” a jumble of strings, patches, and incantatory melody, illustrates this texture. It’s nice to witness a band’s expansion, to follow a signature style into more exploratory terrain.

The album’s highlight, though, is the driving “Echo Party,” whose looping bridges build to a dubious, timely chorus: “There’s a lot of people dancing downtown / Yeah, we all fall down / But some stay where they got dropped.” Meath’s flat, affectless delivery adds to the song’s ominous power. Like Nora dancing the tarantella in A Doll’s House, it’s a stark nod to dance as a bodily release, a way to skirt the darkness. Sanborn’s pinging, circular synth forms the perfect complement, a syncopated beat laced with wobbly bass. It evokes other end-of-summer jams that manage to distill the present while hearkening back to dance music’s past—Drake’s “Massive,” Beyoncé’s “Break My Soul.” At their best, Sylvan Esso is still playing with duality—up and down (see 2014’s “Coffee”), movement and stagnation, containment and release.

“Sunburn” reverts to a tried and true sound that’s less propulsive and more somnambulant. “Didn’t Care” is a bright, poppy track about fate that needs a jolt of urgency. Still, No Rules Sandy wanders into darker rooms, and it’s a welcome divergence from the band’s precedented formula, an exploration of unprecedented times. W PHOTO BY BRIAN KARLSSON