While ordering a coffee this week, I heard a song on the cafe speakers that felt sneakily familiar. In truth, I’ve been hearing it all over: that playful guitar riff followed by a lilting croon of “and there is nothing to see here except sweetness.” Recognizing it as the album I’d just been looping in my own headphones all week, I smiled. It is with a special kind of melancholy that the song “Blood” by Mary in the Junkyard pierces the ear and finds its way into the heart. And soon, onto the stage of Mississippi Studios, as Mary in the Junkyard make their way to Portland Friday, November 6.
The voice and iconic guitar riff are Clari Freeman-Taylor, who plays alongside Saya Barbaglia (bass and viola,) and David Addison (drums). The UK outfit that we know as Mary in the Junkyard came together rather fortuitously; Freeman-Taylor and Barbaglia met at a classical music camp, and Freeman-Taylor met Addison in a previous musical project. Bound by a youthful creative energy, the indie-folk sounds that permeate the band’s latest full-length, Role Model Hermit, feel greater than the sum of their parts. The album, released back in July, serves as a grandiose exploration that is both vulnerable and intentional.
“Clari’s been writing songs… since she was 13. She grew up in a village called Kempton, which is pretty remote and natural, like countryside,” Addison tells me from a computer screen. It’s already dark in the early evening in London. “We’ve been playing gigs and involved in the indie scene. But Clari’s especially into the folk scene.” I mention that their cover art, while distinct in its depiction of a misty British coastline, reminds me of the foggy beaches here in the Pacific Northwest. It reminds me of Death in the Business of Whaling by Portland locals Searows, which also embodies a musical mythos built around regional folklore and literary mystique.
Mary in the Junkyard’s folkloric influence really does bleed through. Look closely at the cover art for Role Model Hermit, for instance: it looks like an old man by the sea with a mouse on his shoulder, no? But what’s more is that this man is actually Freeman-Taylor herself, decked out in prosthetics and makeup and dressed as a fisherman of yore. Conceptual, and perhaps a play on the band’s love of David Lynch, the image feels like a surreal depiction of a character Freeman-Taylor may have embodied in a past life, with a pet mouse, adding to the visuals for the album’s track “Mouse.”
“The concept or the theme, to me, is that idea of past lives and experiences—myths and fables—being a way you can process emotions and things that have actually happened in your life,” Addison says. “Which I guess is one of the key things about folk music.” Charming and a bit offkilter, Mary in the Junkyard is earnest in their sound, if not cheeky in performance.
With a now growing fanbase, Mary in the Junkyard is off on the road again, soon returning to Portland. “We always try to meet new people [on tour],” Addison says with a smile. “In Portland, when we did the Wet Leg tour last year, we met some really lovely people who were science students at the university, and they’d been working on these crazy robots. We went to see their workshop, and then they took us around the market.”
Both onstage and off, the band embodies a kind of affable sincerity. The track “Blood,” presented with an accompanying music video that’s both strange and endearing, is as raw as its namesake. It speaks to vulnerability and that feeling of being exposed while letting someone new in. Relatable, natural, and utterly human, it’s all inherently a bit scary. Mary in the Junkyard has a kind way of relating to that tender duality by way of a gentle sound that’s touched by a bit of beautiful, scrappy wreckage.
It’s as Freeman-Taylor sings it herself: “There is nothing to see here except sweetness.” And of course, their upcoming show.
Mary in the Junkyard plays Mississippi Studios on Nov 6, 9 pm, $26.20, more info.