Sam MacPherson's ‘Powerlines’ Is a Sonic Roadtrip Through Life's Peaks and Valleys
If music is your sickness, and I suspect for many readers here it is, what a gift it is to be able to cure, or at least inoculate yourself, of that sickness. Better yet, take that viral load of creativity and make it into an emotional vaccine for all to draw from, a slip of poison to make us stronger in the shared burden of life’s journey. A child of the Garden State, Sam MacPherson is very much the new century ADD songwriter, in one moment, enabling the anxieties of a digital boxed-in generation, wrestling the unsaid down with sweet-sounding guitars and vocals, mirroring a narrative to the edges, then pulling you off the plane entirely into an unanticipated perspective. This familiar, woven into the new and unknown, might be a result of his scavenger-like process, a countenance to doom scrolling and lost intimacy.
In Powerlines, MacPherson takes his formidable vocalism and rinses it through a sieve of young adult narratives—love slipping into nostalgia, post-love myth-making, and a struggle to wrestle the incoherent into the obvious. It draws from a relatively recent timeline of song creation, a through line of a year put into a melodic capsule, building on prior sonic foundations but purposefully building range and dynamics. Powerlines is a proper road trip in sonic form, a collision of songs taking you from one grand destination to the next, never forgetting the quiet pit stops in between. The architecture of the EP, particularly its momentum-shifting structures, is equally found in sticky singles like "Backseat," and the namesake of the work, "Powerlines," a hyper-descriptive story of dizzying, deja vu imagery that pours poetry over a tension-building rhythm.
Like the image that adorns the project, MacPherson pulling a thick rope attached to something out of frame, evidently struggling but sturdy, resisting forces unknown, this masterful EP is a digestive of the well-known and surprising. A true continuation of the artist's deeply poetic songwriting but also a huge leap forward in mining the melodic range of pop, Powerlines is a classic example of artists doing more with less. This EP is true fuel for an ascent to stardom, a powerful ignition of craft that changes the luster of the air around it the more its plays.
Listen to Powerlines below:
