Review Summary: Looks like the garden is coming along quite nicely.
Six years is a long time to continuously nurture and maintain a garden, but Haley Heynderickx has been doing so under our noses this entire time. Ever since she put out her critically acclaimed debut LP
I Need to Start a Garden back in 2018, Heynderickx has been dropping little bits and bites of what we’d eventually see on the tracklist of
Seed of a Seed. A few live performances here, a few studio performances there… and eventually, these seeds (pun intended) grew into the record you now see before you. Why did it take so long for these songs to make it into an official tracklist? As far as I can tell, there’s no concrete reason for the delay. Perhaps Heynderickx just wants to take the quality-over-quantity route, which would certainly be admirable. Regardless, the record is here. So how does it fare?
Thankfully, the aforementioned “quality-over-quantity” phrase still rings true. While
Seed of a Seed maintains Heynderickx’s signature brand of cryptic, emotionally vulnerable brand of folk, it also represents an expansion of the singer-songwriter’s musical toolkit. The near-suffocating feelings of anxiety and apprehension found on
I Need to Start a Garden have been allowed to take on more shapes and forms this time around – whether it’s the sweeping southern-gothic vibe of opener “Gemini”, the melancholic reverb-laden guitar repetitions of “Spit in the Sink”, or the oddly transcendent intro of album highlight “Redwoods (Anxious God)”. And I’d like to emphasize the word “sweeping”, because that’s the biggest thing separating
Seed of a Seed from its predecessor. While the title track and “Spit in the Sink” are quite stripped-down in nature, they’re actually in the minority here; by contrast, most of these tracks take on a more cinematic and expansive feel.
As such, the backing instrumentation has also been greatly expanded from Heynderickx’s prior effort. “Mouth of a Flower” and “Jerry’s Song”, for example, use dramatic string swells to really drive home their emotional peaks; meanwhile, the climax of “Gemini” is given a gorgeous electric guitar backdrop, making an otherwise subdued folk rocker sound absolutely
huge. Now, I’m aware that this increased scope might prove contentious for fans of the relative minimalism and intimacy of
I Need to Start a Garden. However, these little moments of grandiosity simply serve to
support the mood of the songs rather than diminish it. “Redwoods” still gives off a palpable sense of uncertainty and anxiety, “Foxglove” still sounds appropriately wistful and plaintive, and “Sorry Fahey” still evokes bittersweet regretful longing. But now Heynderickx has more spacious locales with which to express these moods, and the results are often breathtaking.
As with
I Need to Start a Garden, some of the best moments come from the marriage of lyrical and instrumental storytelling. And while Heynderickx’s lyrics aren’t quite as powerful or well-written as on her debut, there are still quite a few gems here. The pensive folk shuffle of “Foxglove”, for instance, fits nicely with its cryptic musings about fairgrounds and dying daydreams; then there’s the title track, whose gentle strings and light acoustic strumming are a nice accompaniment to the sentiments of simplicity and humility found in the text. With that said, not
every line is a home run. In fact, one of the worst lines appears in the very beginning of opener “Gemini”: “And this weight that I've been leaning/And the persons I'm deceiving/And the food that I've been eating says I'm processed”. I understand that the last part is a play on “you are what you eat”, but it’s just a bit lazy and seems beneath Heynderickx’s usual pen game. Thankfully, such moments don’t appear too often on the record as a whole.
Seed of a Seed doesn’t quite reach the heights of
I Need to Start a Garden (and let’s be honest, that’s a HIGH bar to clear as it is), but it’s still quite an impressive offering. Instead of lazily rehashing what made her debut so special, Heynderickx decided to expand on it and give her songs a more panoramic space to roam in. Most importantly, the core characteristics of her style weren’t lost in the process. This still has the same melancholic, vulnerable, somewhat eccentric Haley Heynderickx we heard on the debut, just given some musical retooling to update her sound. I usually hesitate to consider an album “worth the wait” after six long years, but if the results are as strong as
Seed of a Seed, I’ll happily make an exception to that notion.
