As part of a design contest for students who attend the local after-school music program School of Rock, nine-year-old Jeju painted a field of blue. In the center, a yellow rectangle swims, along with the title of Swinging’s new release, My Bed Is A Boat, in capital letters. The winning cover feels conversant with the Portland band’s debut album. It’s subtle yet feeling, watery and expansive.
Swinging’s current lineup features songwriter, vocalist, and guitarist Ash Vale, multiinstrumentalist engineer Finn Snead, and bassist Zoe Chamberlain. Their sound lives under the loose umbrellas of slowcore, post-country, and chamber folk, and the band has found a loving audience in those who sway or stand still at shows, eyes open, receptive.
True to their name, Swinging’s first album swings, wavering between vulnerability and resolve, nostalgia and forward motion. But like a pendulum caught in midair, the messages of My Bed Is A Boat linger in the murky middle ground of remembering, too. What happens when you’re no longer living in the past, but haven’t moved on, either?
My Bed Is a Boat is never quite moody but always wandering, like fog rolling over a familiar landscape. The album’s sound shifts between the hollow, echoing quality of a message shouted down a tunnel and the lush, cacophonous textures of sonic collage. Vale’s lyrics are diaristic and vulnerable, often delivered in straightforward language that evokes a kind of Artist’s Way morning-pages intimacy. Their voice, deep and painfully pure at first, softens like wool as I listen and fits smoothly into the album’s emotional terrain. The band describes Vale’s lyrics as “conversational, rambling, and ecological,” and they are right about this. On “Forerunner,” Vale sings simply, “kissing the dog on the nose.”
Vale often addresses a “you,” a choice that feels both like an open invitation and an extended love letter to a specific person, someone just out of view. The result is a shared intimacy throughout the album. And if Swinging’s bed is a boat, one could interpret their lyrics as dreams, composed of fragmented recollections and sensory shards. This boat-bed is a guiding image for the album’s whole approach. It’s oceanic and deeply engaged in the process.
Vale’s voice stays within a narrow register, which, paired with Snead’s production, lends the album a somber, ethereal hush. On “I Knew It,” their voice sounds steady and wounded all at once: “There’s more than an ounce of care there, there’s honey for the oatmeal, there’s a wave crashing toward me like the tide, dear.” Midway through the album, “Nehalem Bay” is hyper-local and richly felt, too, calling in images of coastal pine and jewelweed surrounding the scent of smoke, all of which dissolves into a swelling racket of shoegaze-esque fuzz.
Although much of My Bed Is A Boat feels grounded in the rivers and mountains of the Pacific Northwest, “Athens, Ohio” stands out as one of the most fully realized tracks on the record. It opens with a laugh, then unfolds into daydreams of barn owls, thunderstorms, slain rabbits, and vernal pools. Swinging leads us to the backwoods of Ohio, where ponds are shaded by hickory and red-winged blackbirds “fly in from every direction,” but they don’t leave us there. “I drove away in the dawn light, the barred owl decomposed, the vernal pool is all dried up,” Vale sings. The pendulum swings from rootedness to release. As easily as we arrived, we get back in the car with them, and we leave that place.
The interlude “(I Carry It With Me)” is a two-minute lull of soft, hope-filled plucking that melts into field recordings—crows cawing, crackles, the low roar of atmosphere. It’s so fleeting you might miss it, but maybe that’s part of the point. Lived experience flows like water between our fingers.
The band’s narrative clarity draws from country sensibilities, but filters these through atmospheric washes and synth layers. You’ll dig it if you’re interested in the storytelling of Smog, the naturescapes of Mount Eerie, or the atmospheric weight of Grouper. There are echoes of Claire Rousay, too, in the album’s blend of field recordings and droning texture.
Like its title, My Bed Is a Boat offers refuge for those still floating between places, whether it’s the Pacific Coast, the midwest, or somewhere more distant. The album doesn’t overstay its welcome; its 34 minutes feel carefully measured, sweeping but spare, built of restraint and intuition. It’s a debut of rare emotional lucidity. And what should the listener do, then, with the weight of their own memories? The answer, Swinging argues, is simple. Don’t escape. Immerse yourself.
Swinging’s My Bed Is A Boat was released June 27 and can be found on Bandcamp.
