GOLDEN APPLES

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There’s a kind of magic in the phenomena of stepping outdoors into the nighttime and gazing up at the milky black expanse. If you wait a while, the void fills in with pinpricks of light and, if you’re attentive or just plain lucky–you’re rewarded with the sight of the elusive meteor. That experience works as a tidy metaphor for the creative process that formed Shooting Star, the newest record from Philadelphia’s Golden Apples, a prolific group of musicians formed and heralded by singer and songwriter Russell Edling.

Following the "rich jangle and big, well-developed songs" (Bandcamp) of 2023's Bananasugarfire, Edling sought to deconstruct his creative process by centering collaboration instead of a more solitary pursuit in songwriting, even as personal matters made isolation a more natural instinct. He describes taking time to make notes of the ways, timing and forms in which songs came to him in the process of demoing the record, and regularly questioning if his approach was like that of “watching a pot of water boil” or waiting for a bolt of light to appear in the sky. In many ways, Shooting Star is an appeal to the muse, a record of “songs about writing songs” born from Edling’s desire to trust his instincts despite the posturings of inner demons and creative roadblocks, and to celebrate the little wins along the way. 

The result is a sprawling new work packed to the brim with playful eccentricities and dynamism, one that owes as much of its inspiration to mid-century folkies like Michael Hurley and Karen Dalton as it does to alt rock of the nineties like Yo La Tengo and Stereolab. Shooting Star is a constellation of influences, experiences, reckonings–with the state of the world, with others, with creativity, with oneself–with no two songs created in the same way. Instead of holing up in a recording studio, the creation of the record was formed by a patchwork of collaborations in a variety of recording locales, all which were later alchemized by mix engineer Matthew Schimelfenig

Anxiety and isolation go hand in hand with connection and elation on Shooting Star, each sentiment harmonized by dreamy mellotron and static haze or raucous spurs of scrubby guitars and doubled vocals. Across the record’s twelve songs, Edling wrestles with the human experience with an almost holistic touch, with lyrics that feel both deeply considered and sometimes wonderfully offhand. On “Mind” the persistent, outwardly sunny ode to chugging through life as the world burns à la The Kooks, Edling wrestles with the emotional dissonance of Western life in a time of global upheaval, singing “if this love is an event in my mind, and all this evil is an event in my mind, I must be out of mind.” 

The record further unfurls with the muscular, shimmery “Noonday Demon,” a track that gets its title from a book subtitled the “atlas of depression” that Edling says lives on his bedside table. Edling’s pen is no less sharp on “Freeee,” with its whirling, watery intro, which Edling wote after a listen to Deerhoof’s Milkman renewed his interest in the labyrinths of music production, and no less evocative on the warbled album opener “Another Grand Offering For The Swine.” In a flush of warmth, the track acts as a prelude to the record, where Edling considers both the burden and liberation of creating and releasing art into an uncaring void. 

Across the fuller swath of the record, Edling’s lyricism volleys between gestural and impressionistic and cutting and confronting, softening with a tender romanticism on tracks that reference his life with partner and bandmate Mimi Gallagher. Even in the throes of the more difficult experiences that life has to offer, we still fall in love, plan weddings, make art, and Edling paints his romanticism with an acute awareness of the pitfalls of our shared humanity. 

Edling explores that precariousness across a trio of songs that feel like lost gems from the early 2000s. There’s the fuzzed up slacker-rock of “Ditto,” where he deals in escapism and self forgiveness, musing “we should dress in silver and head for the sea / I wanna see the sun setting in your teeth,” then interrogating the notion of being a perennially content on “Happy.” Sunny, strummy “Feliz” builds a potent haze of acoustic and electric guitar as Edling sings of early memories of his and Gallagher’s romance against the “hotel dark” on a morning in the Hollywood Hills.

There’s a loose, homespun quality to many of the recordings, including “Divine Blight” which offers a bit of reverence to the ephemeral and perfectly-imperfect nature of demo recordings, which reportedly also captures Gallagher hammering a shelf in the background. The track offers just one of many conclusions Edling arrives at across the record when it comes to creativity, admitting “I tried to take the reins, but the reins took me instead.” 

Regardless of his purported findings when it comes to creativity, it’s undeniable that what Edling and Golden Apples have is a real deftness in their craft, bolstered by a profound sense of curiosity, humility and vision. Edling describes Shooting Star as a collection of “groovers, rockers, rollers, and bangers. All fashioned in my dumb little hand hewn way.” It’s an apt description for the lush and inventive record they’ve made, which comes on as a rush of jangle pop and lo-fi rock with all the poetic fittings of an academic lit course. 

It’s said that in the lifespan of the universe, human existence is only a blip in time, a shooting star. While puzzling with what often feels like a bleak future, Edling wrote one of the album’s closing tracks, “Song For The Record Exchange” asking “When we get there, will there be anything left?” and while there’s no way to really know for sure–Edling’s found a way to share his own constellation of experiences and reckonings in a way that might help us all make sense of our own.