Rivulets – d e m o s
I’m a pretty new to the music of Rivulets (AKA Nathan Amundson), having taken the opportunity to listen to the acoustic version of Stead (from 2002′s Thank You Reykjavik) just a few months ago. It was one of those songs that is so immediately easy to love and inspired the quest to hear more, but I’ve been taking my own sweet time about it. After a track here and there, Debridement finally became my first proper foray into the Rivulets catalogue – which is really quite wonderful and has been on high rotation the last couple of weeks.
Of course, it does further the desire to hear more, so alongside putting all current releases on my ever-growing ‘wish list’, I was happy to learn that not only was a new album planned for release in the near future, but that a recording of demos was recently made available to download via Silber Records, for the more than reasonable sum of US$5.00. (I’m also quite looking forward to the planned Stray Songs, which, according to a post on the Rivulets website, will be a complete collection of singles, compilation tracks and covers spanning 2000-2010).
Originally self-released in 2000 on CDr and containing four tracks, the digital-only re-release of d e m o s has been expanded by an additional 6 tracks. Unfortunately for me, I’m not familiar with any of the later incarnations of these songs yet, so it’s impossible for me to get the same kind of insight from them that long-time fans might, but even without that history I can certainly appreciate them – some really nice, occasionally raw, work.
From the Silber Records website (for those a little more in the know than me 
):
“d e m o s” captures an era of Rivulets that hasn’t been documented elsewhere. During the first formative year of Rivulets, an important part of the band was bass player Jason Seckel, who’s minimal long sustained notes style can finally be heard for the first time by many fans. You get to hear early versions of songs like “Four Weeks” & “Past Life” along with unreleased songs like “Sick Love” & our personal favorite “Anyway.”
Visit here to go get your copy of d e m o s.
For my part, Rivulets is assuredly recommended for fans of softly spoken, highly charged acoustic slowcore – and quite likely to appeal to fans of Boduf Songs, Tiny Vipers, Jessica Bailiff (who has, I see, been a collaborator on a few projects) and Spokane.
Need more convincing? Watch, listen and ♥ this live performance of The Road.
S4E
July 23rd, 2010 at 9:22 pm
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