“Chilling and Igniting”: Stream Abi Reimold’s new EP Forget

“I’m scared I’ll forget you” are the lone words sung by local musician Abi Reimold on the title track of her new EP Forget, released today through Bandcamp.  At just a few seconds longer than one minute, it’s the shortest song on the five-song EP and yet it embodies the record’s universal truth both sonically and lyrically, stripping it down to its unadorned core before the letting the context of its surrounding tracks wash over.

Across all five songs there is this sense of impending change, a calm before the storm, as each one builds to a pivotal final thought.  Often Reimold is grasping for something just out of reach or right before it slips away, whether it’s “you” like on “Forget” or an emotion on “Burn,” a former self on “Morning.” Using dark imagery broken into sentence shards like a shattered mirror, she examines basic human instincts and conditions like fight or flight, fear and love, life and death, though she does it more poetically and strikingly than most of her peers.  This isn’t a melodramatic meditation on “the big questions,” though, by any means.  Forget is artful, complex, challenging and uncomfortable at times, and the scenes constructed by the vivid lyrics will stay with you.

Backed by friends Nick Morrison and Scott Stitzer from Mumblr on drums, bass and Jesse Kennedy on guitar, Reimold has elevated the production on this effort, incorporating more instruments and elements with her signature looping, swelling and harmonizing that she usually manages to do solo.  But the EP benefits from the fullness of instrumentation.  From the crushing crescendo of “Morning” to the taunting repetitions of “Your Shoes,” Forget is a simultaneously chilling and igniting release from Reimold that pulls in the best fragments of her earlier single releases to create something full of unexpected shifts and lyrics that warrant much consideration.  Stream the EP below and get a name-your-own-price download here.