Review Summary: Downers Grove: Population 50,247. A southwestern suburb of Chicago. Small enough to be considered a "town". Small enough to be haunted by the memories of a young, queer man.
As anyone who’s grown up in (and subsequently left) the midwest might tell you, memories, even happy ones, are often muddled with a thin layer of gloom, a sort of melancholy that seems to permeate from the nearby lakefront or the damp chill of autumn frost. It’s there in the quiet of the summer nights, as the fireflies rise and fall like embers from the meadow, or lingering in the rumble of thunder as it makes its way over the rolling hills. It’s felt most prevalently not in the city, even the plains, but in the quiet suburban towns, the ones that are big enough not to be considered small, but small enough to warrant everyone knowing your business. To return to these spaces is to almost find yourself suspended in time. Here the storefronts may change slightly, and the townhall may get a facelift every twenty years, but in many ways it’s almost the pause in between breaths. In this space I find myself increasingly nostalgic.
Nostalgia comes in two waves. There’s the first that is a panging sadness when one finds that the place they grew up in is no longer the same. The small restaurants and empty fields have been smudged from the record to make way for fast food chains, office buildings, and supermarkets. The people who made the location feel like a home are gone or dead, or no longer the same as you remember them.
Then there’s the other kind, the sort one experiences with a lilting half-smile, that hits like a southbound train when you realize that nothing has changed, except you. There’s the realization that the people and places are all the same, but you aren’t. Oh, you might be a little older, donning a different haircut, or perhaps a new style, but the person that people see in front of them as they greet you and welcome you back isn’t the same that THEY remember. And how could you be the same, seeing a different world than the small one you once considered so large, especially after acquiring a new sense of self? It’s this lingering space of loss, memory, and broken-heartedness that Kevin Atwater explores on
Downers Grove, his latest EP.
If 2022’s
retriever was a coming-out party for Atwater, an EP that introduced the world to Atwater as an artist with a penchant for smart storytelling and a whimsical delivery, then
Downers Grove is the aftermath, a comedown that feels part honest reflection, and part artistic expansion. It’s strange to say that Atwater has matured in a year’s time, but it’s an accurate assessment.
Downers Grove very much finds him not entirely abandoning the qualities of his songwriting that make him a familiar voice for listeners of indie folk, but rather settling into his own, crafting lush soundscapes that pair well with his gentle voice, falsetto croons, and layered guitar playing. It’s within this richly constructed space that he revisits memories of toxic masculinity (“jacob killed a cat”), loss of innocence (“tattletale”), and unreciprocated love (“christopher street”), recounting the gut-wrenching details like a boy sitting in the backseat of a car, watching small-town storefronts roll past through the haze of a midwestern afternoon.
Ultimately,
Downer’s Grove is a success that experiences few missteps. Even with the occasional tone shifts (the poppy “KEEP IT COOL!” or Taylor Swift-inspired “star tripping”) the songwriting and textures remain consistent. This is the EP of someone who, despite this only being their second outing, sounds cozied up among some of their more veteran contemporaries. It’s an EP that explores this forgotten space, this suspension of time and memory. And even though it’s too short and sometimes painful, this is a trip you’re going to want to take with him again and again.
