Let’s Just See How It Plays…
Ontario indie-folk duo Alternate Ending knows how you feel
In the deafening and surreal chaos at the end of 2022, there’s something about indie-folk duo Alternate Ending’s debut EP, Stations, that feels like a rescue. Like staggering for two days and as many nights through a sunless forest, lost and hungry, and then finally coming upon a fully-stocked log cabin with a crackling blaze in the fireplace.
Reminiscent of English folk, Seventies prog and reverb-soaked Aughts pastoralists Fleet Foxes and The Head & The Heart, Stations cloaks lyricist Colin Halyk’s psalms of philosophical acceptance in an often-orchestral sonic landscape of delicate chamber pop. Your high school band teacher would call Halyk’s shimmering production “musical,” and she’d be correct.
Still, what really makes Stations so wonderful is the fusion of the duo’s singing styles. Deborah Tihanyi’s gentle, plaintive voice combined with Halyk’s often joyous leaps from baritone to tenor make the project feel like a really interesting conversation, a chat between two friends who have found some kind of elegance in maturity, an elegance that’s almost Buddhist in nature.
To my ear, Stations is Halyk’s Mt. Everest, and his production is strong enough to reward even the least discriminating listener. Constant surprises delight: the swelling synths and fairground sound collage of the title track; the timpani flourishes leading into the last verse of “Light Our Way Home”; and the layered acoustic guitars dancing across the headphones in “Not Right Away.” In Halyk and Tihanyi’s “Who Would Have Thought?” an organ and string section call out and are answered by a triangle.
Colin Halyk, who for most of his almost 40-year career has sung in an exultant, vibrato-rich vocal style, is more nuanced than ever on Stations. Like his singer partner, his performances are as understated as they are expressive. And not only does it work, it works like a charm.
“You’ve spent so long feeling like your fighting in some war,” he sings in “Not Right Away,” a meditation on patience. “But you’ve let go of the memory of what you’re fighting for.” A younger Colin Halyk might have reached for vocal histrionics to get across his point, but now he knows he doesn’t need to. “Not Right Away” is infused with the wisdom that comes when you take a good, hard look at Big Dreams. It’s about learning that shit happens when it’s supposed to happen, or it doesn’t happen at all. Either way, you’re good.
Dreams are what we need to know to way to go
How else would we know?
“There will come a day
But not right away.
— “Not Right Away”/Colin Halyk SOCAN
Lovely as it sounds, Stations does not overlook the surreal 24-hour doomscroll that is 2022. “There’s not a single thing to fear/ Because none of that stuff could ever happen here,” Tihanyi smirks in “Something’s Burning,” a track that begins with a dense, proggy chord sequence that feels like Jethro Tull, circa 1972. But Alternate Ending meets the darkness halfway, with a philosophical acceptance of the world, human nature and suffering. After all, the Zen masters remind us, if pain is transient, so then is joy. “Even if it’s right,” Tihanyi sings in “Dawning of the Day,” the EP’s gorgeous opener, “it won’t be right forever.”
On Stations, Alternate Ending dives deep into regret and disappointment but somehow resurfaces minutes later with cheerfulness. “I’m proud of what I built,” Halyk sings in the title track’s most Leonard Cohenesque couplet, “But also wondering what any of it means.”
To this listener, the philosophical bottom line of Stations is that even bullshit can be counted on to produce a magic mushroom, eventually.
I’ll microdose that.
