I'm trying to get back in the swing of writing about albums consistently in 2025, so I'm going to take it easy on myself and look back at an old favorite. Flickers at the Station is a 2018 album from Samara Lubelski. Samara is a multi-instrumentalist who was residing in Soho, NYC, at the time of Flickers's release (not sure where she is now- she may be rooted to the concrete of a rent-controlled brownstone, or may have drifted off over the salty sea in search of enlightenment like a fabled seabird- I'd be credulous in either scenario). Starting out as a professional violinist, she quickly transitioned to guitar, bass, and cello, and in the process, became a go-to studio musician for the likes of Thurston Moore, the Fiery Furnaces, and Body/Head’s Bill Nace, among others- but that's all flavor text- where's the main dish? Between her 1997 solo debut, In the Valley, and 2018, Samara became known for her prolific output as much as her skills as a musician capable of capturing the drift of the unknown with a sort of rapt immediacy. Flickers at the Station is her ninth LP, seeing her stick mostly to guitar and vocals to craft intricately layered, jangly, and somewhat avant-garde baroque pop with a whimsically nostalgic centripetal core. The album was recorded in the German countryside, backed by her folk popper friends and frequent collaborators, the Metabolismus, the setting bequeathed a certain pastoral wariness to the urbane ye-ye flush that ripples through the album and breaths life into the dazzling wilt of its pilot light, like a retreat into a thalassic pool of nameless earthen shapes, whose overlapping embrace and comingling patterns inseminate the synapses with variegated parturition of offspring who speak in a language of life beyond mere sensory intuition. Don't be remiss; that flickering in the distance is your stop- an egress point into a cenote of contemplative configurations that you'll know before you endure and endure like a ray of sunshine coursing down your crown.
