Search 
Owen
The following description was submitted by the event organizer.
Spanning more than two decades, Mike Kinsella's widely influential songwriting has steadily sharpened and evolved with each new chapter. In his solo vehicle as Owen (in addition to his roles along the way with American Football, Cap'n Jazz, the more recent LIES, and other collaborative ventures), Kinsella’s ability to seamlessly stitch jagged emotional currents into crushingly beautiful songs has remained at the forefront of his art.
This contrast has become more distinct as Owen expanded from unassuming acoustic beginnings into more ornate production, reaching new levels of complexity and clarity by the release of 2020’s The Avalanche. The Falls of Sioux, Kinsella’s newest Owen full-length, levels up even further. As much as these nine songs represent a type of reinvention, they also feel like the natural next step in Kinsella’s artistic and personal growth. The album perforates an established sound to explore unlikely musical ideas, while the songs document a time of moving through life-altering turmoil into brighter days. Heavy themes are turned over with a gentle hand, and Kinsella inhabits the deeper perspectives that come with hard-earned life experience. The Avalanche was an unbuffered exposition of some of Kinsella’s darkest days, laying bare the emotional fallout of his divorce along with several other gradients of grief and loss. Those days aren’t forgotten, but the pieces have been picked up on The Falls of Sioux. Solidly on the other side of a painful chasm, moments of intensity now come across as confident and exploratory rather than tormented. The songs detail interpersonal situations that might have instilled panic and self-loathing in younger days, but now Kinsella meets them with a relaxed smirk. It’s there in the way gliding synths and warm vocal harmonies juxtapose brutal lyrics of doomed love on “Virtue Misspent,” one of the album’s most upbeat songs. It’s also there in the jaunty, nearly classic-rock bounce of “Mount Cleverest,” a lively banger that feels like the high point of a sunny summer day but boils down to exhausted, “fuck all y’all” sentiments.