One Track Mind

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This past Tuesday, Marc Morrissette and his partners in Octoberman released their third full-length record, Fortresses, on White Whale Records. Installment number three finds Morrissette moving even further away from the project’s bare bones roots toward a more fully fleshed out, full band vision while still retaining the spirit of the troubadour that defined Octoberman’s first recordings. Its quiet passages are never boring, and there is an immediate familiarity to most of the songs on the twelve track set.

“Trapped in the New Scene” is a pastoral stroll led by acoustic and slide guitars and an inconspicuous buttress of piano chords. While the atmosphere is meditative, the song has plenty of character to set it apart from its peers. Morrissette’s vocals, for starters, are a heartbroken spectacle, the perfect vehicle for the wordplay and evocative imagery of lines like “She was thrown from her throne / And landed alone / In garbage bag trees.” While it is hard not to think of The Arcade Fire’s “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)” while listening to the vocal melody during the verse, there isn’t much else here that has been borrowed. The slide guitar and gentle flushes of strings become more prominent as the song draws to a close, heightening the sense of drama and lending a greater sense of completion to the song’s arc. With “Trapped in the New Scene,” Octoberman have recorded a song that feels as though it hasn’t been fussed with too much, but that is simply a testament to the solid execution throughout.