Penny & Sparrow Lefty 2LP

The last album from Penny & Sparrow, Olly Olly, was a work of revelation and liberation. A search for and an embrace of the self. I imagine they were left with a headscratcher of a question: well, shit. Where do you go from there?

Aiming to strip away pretense and invite experimentation, they commandeered a garden shed from a friend and retrofitted it to make a 20-track album that is vast, weird, and wholly unexpected.

If Lefty is anything, it is the journal of Penny & Sparrow's inner child. Dog-eared, lock busted open. On its pages the sketches of dreams, nightmares, erotica, and literary fanfiction graffiti the margins of poetry, elegies, and love letters in the wild colors of saxophone blue, electronic pink, and blood harmony red.

Beautifully varied and richly rendered, it is an album that wanders from theme to theme, style to style, exultation to tragedy. Yet it is never lost. If anything, it is at play.

Lefty feels like not just a celebration of their journey beyond the bounds of their traditional genre, but as if they have rediscovered the joy in music by honoring the sounds that inspired two boys growing up in Texas to one day make the damn stuff themselves.

The duo delivers their vocals in aching falsettos that bring to mind indie touchstones like Bon Iver and Hovvdy

Simon & Garfunkel-meets-Bon Iver