Not to immediately dive into Tributaries, the new release from Saint John quintet The Backstays, with needless ambiguities, but this is an album that travels on vibes. Co-produced by Romesh Thavanathan of Hey Rosetta!, Tributaries is a big mood album, better gulped than sipped. The band kicks off with a sense of brooding, dominated by Keith Whipple’s bass and Serenna Chapman’s keys, for a slow burn spanning not just songs but the entire album.
“Romesh came down from St. John’s to Saint John for a couple weeks in summer 2019,” says Pete Johnston, the band’s vocalist. “We worked pretty much around the clock— it was organized chaos. Romesh brought the organization of course, but he also came with an open mind and willingness to chase down ideas and reign things back when needed. It can be hard to know when a song is finished. It’s all just guesswork at the gut level.”
Overall, that rush seems to have made for a more consistent album. Where their debut self-titled EP felt more episodic—each song distinguishable as a single and often targeting specific events from the history of their hometown of Saint John, New Brunswick—Tributaries feels like a massively creeping arc that slowly culminates as a single homogenous movement. For most songs on Tributaries, the band put their foot on the gas somewhere around indie rock and max out at New Wave, finding all of their peaks, literally and figuratively, within the synths, on an A/B split.
There’s a straight-line trajectory, beginning with the album’s moody opening track of “Aquarius” and finally arrived at a borderline jubilant “Forever Gold Bricks” that’s somehow still reminiscent of a bittersweet Stars single crossed with a Springsteen song.
‘”When the pieces first came together, it was about trying to escape but never being able to move on; like chasing after something intangible,” says Chapman about ‘Forever Gold Bricks.’ “I’d say this is a cautionary tale about how running away, towards empty, superficial things ultimately never works.”
Obviously not a self-reference, “Forever Gold Bricks” is certainly something that does work on the album, along with the other two final tracks on Tributaries, “Waiting” and “Hannah,” swinging clear of any melancholy and proving to be real highlights. It’s an intentional shift that picks up right around the album’s midpoint around “Hard to Find,” for what Johnston describes as the album’s “ebb and flow.”
“Because so much of making this record was us learning how to fit these different sonic elements together, we wanted to take each song somewhere new, to see what sounds lent themselves to different stories,” says Johnston.
The album, unsurprisingly shines with its brighter tracks, going so far as to indulge in the occasional bit of fiddle. As Johnston says, at times it’s a bit of a sonic kitbash—layering unexpected detail over the habitual foundation—but such is the nature of experimentation, and they make it work.