by David Wilikofsky
While recording their debut EP, Devil’s Rain, Maria BC conjured up fully formed musical worlds from inside their Brooklyn apartment bathroom. Now based out of Oakland, they’re still creating the same brand of hypnotic bedroom pop, music that lands somewhere between loner folk and ambient soundscapes. Hyaline, their debut album, is their most fully formed statement to date. It does everything a great debut should: it serves as both a perfect introduction to and tantalizing taste of their sonic universe.
The base musical elements Maria BC uses throughout Hyaline are instantly familiar: a guitar, their classically trained voice, synths, field recordings. However, they choose to largely eschew traditional song structures in favor of conjuring up all-enveloping sonic landscapes. They describe their approach to songwriting as “sonic collage”, and each knotty track feels more like a natural occurrence than manmade song; they float, billow, drift across your periphery, unhurriedly unfurling on their own time. Their writing tows a line somewhere between personal history and character study; “The Only Thing” captures the giddy feelings of falling in love for the first time, while “Keepsakes” explore the void left by loss. Unfailingly, each song focuses on bringing out the emotional core of its narrative. Backed by the album’s spectral instrumentals, their stories begin to take on the power of lived experience, enveloping you and seeping into each and every pore.
Though Hyaline is undoubtedly a self-assured and focused statement of intent, it also manages to open up plenty of avenues for future exploration. The MIDI arrangements of “Keepsakes” reverberate with the spirit of Kate Bush, while “Good Before” errs towards a more etherial, ambient vision of pop. Elsewhere you’ll hear the swirling soundscapes of closer “Hyaline”, the interlocking vocal acrobatics of “April” or the eerie atmospherics of “Rof”; there’s so much subtle sonic richness locked in each and every track that it’ll take many listens to fully unravel them. Maybe Maria BC will pick up some of these threads in future work, or maybe they’ll go in another direction completely. All I know is that after Hyaline, I’m eagerly anticipating whatever they do next.