Trevor Powers is 22 years-old and hails from Boise, Idaho. His debut album, The Year of Hibernation, is not what you would expect to hear from the spud state. With carefully-crafted and eminently listenable bedroom arrangements, the record's daydreams envelop lyrical anxiety in sonic guaze, attempting to cover up some of the emotional bewilderment. But the artist's vulnerability results in another kind of clarity: a striking musical confession.
On its face, The Year of Hibernation is an unvarnished and home-made blend of buried vocals, keyboard runs, and guitar interludes--the sound of a young and independent musician overhearing his deeply-guarded thoughts. But the emotional complexity of the record is arresting. A clash of joy and mourning, Powers jettisons perfect understanding in favor of emotional honesty. To that end, Powers reaches a small contextual transcendance, a Bon Iver-like DIY recording of a private place and time: the excavation of the artist's youth.
The record runs at just over a half-hour and it feels like a short but unflinching conversation with your best childhood friend, a foray into enchanting memories and painful separations. Where the vocals are buried in the mix, seemingly emerging from the recesses of memory, Powers' instrumentation is clear-cut and in the present-tense. The crystalline keyboards give shape to the intentional spaciness, creating gravity with each note, while the spindly guitars appear from the outer reaches to punctuate his expressions.
The Year of Hibernation's one-word songs are, put simply, small but powerful vignettes of youth. "17." "Posters." "July." "Daydream." "Afternoon." And just when things get too heavy, the music gives way to an exuberance that only the young at heart can understand.
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