Slowly slipping out of the darkness and into the light on the strength of a brittle piano’s yearning cry, Lavendine’s “Finding My Way Home,” the latest chart-climber from the critically acclaimed sister singer/songwriter duo, comes into focus and challenges us to listen closely as its opening bars fill the air with a sense of melancholy. There are no words in this early part of the song, but still, cutting emotional energy protrudes from the speakers and provokes a reaction out of even the most devoted of wallflowers. There’s nothing to come between us and the simple sonic landscape being spun together before us in real-time until singer Jacy Ayers enters the track and effectively colorizes its instrumentation while Jana Ayers continues with a blunt lyrical attack that will persist for the next few minutes.
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/Lavendineband/
The Ayers sisters sing as though they have a lot on their shoulders, and more pressingly, a lot on their minds, they don’t force the music to transition into a more elegiac rhythm than it was already swinging at. They dont need a drumbeat to set up the groove of the instrumentation; if anything, they are a little off-center where the rest of the harmony is taking us, yielding a contrast that isn’t as off-putting as it is humanizing and humble. We haven’t yet reached the cathartic release in “Finding My Way Home,” but the tension in the music is already starting to buckle under the pressure when Jacy takes the lead of Lavendine’s kinetic play, which is tighter than I’ve ever heard it before in this studio recording.
As we get away from the midsection of the track, the music gets even more indulgent and overwhelming in volume and size, but the lush vocal from Jana Ayers keeps us on the edge of our seats through every uncomfortable swell of guitar and bass just the same. She’s got enough charisma with the microphone in her hand to make any and every discordant twist in the arrangement not as bumpy as it would have been with someone else at the helm of this song, and even when “Finding My Way Home” explodes in a kaleidoscopic eruption of instrumentation near its conclusion, her voice is still in the eye of the musical storm, guiding us through the fog and into the safe harbor of a warm aural embrace.
I’ll have to find out myself sometime, but if they’re able to keep pace with what they’re showing off here, it’s a picture that I would want to see. This is one of their best songs that Lavendine has ever recorded (and from some angles, it’s one of their grittier numbers thus far), but its seductive lead singer makes it a must-listen for followers of the acclaimed Oklahoma twosome regardless. I had only heard their work a few times before now, but following the release of this track, I think I’m going to look out for their next album in the future. They’re an easygoing Alt-Pop Rock band with a pair of gunslinger frontwomen who can do just about anything they want to in this most recent recording, and that alone makes their sound a hit in my book.
Garth Thomas