Jennifer Castle Monarch Season

Jennifer Castle's sixth full-length record, the moon-suffused Monarch Season-an album as delicate and diaphanous as its namesake butterfly-stands, in a literal sense, as her first proper "solo" album, performed alone in her coastal kitchen, windows open to the insects and the wind and the reflection of the moon on Lake Erie, entirely without human accompaniment (though a chorus of crickets provides rich interstitial support throughout.) The follow-up to her acclaimed 2018 record Angels of Death, Monarch Season is Castle's private experiment on the effects of microgravity-in this context, increased immediacy, intimacy, domesticity, simplicity, brevity, and directness-on her music. As a distillation of the formal, compositional, and collaborative qualities of her previous work to the elemental-the singular body, the shared Earth, the charged silence of nature at night-Monarch Season transports the listener, from the first strains of the heavy-lidded guitar instrumental "Theory Rest," to that lakeside kitchen at dusk, beneath a bright moon twinned in the water. It also intentionally resembles Castle's riveting, discursive solo live performances more accurately than any other of her albums. Indeed, though it's her sixth full-length record, Monarch Season stands, in a literal sense, as her first proper "solo" album, performed alone, entirely without human accompaniment-though a chorus of crickets provides rich interstitial support throughout. (The terrestrial vinyl and CD versions of the album include lengthier ambient segues of onsite environmental recordings between songs; you can hear the lapping of the lake.) She recorded quickly, with only her longtime co-producer Jeff McMurrich to capture her guitar, piano, and-for the first time on record-harmonica.