dusted

The Minneapolis Uranium Club

I’m sure there are people who glide through November, then December, then New Year’s day without getting snagged by even a single impulse to summarize. Someone somewhere, who, faced with the rapid approach of 2025, has just shrugged without a second or third intrusive thought about what was and what it meant. Must be nice, I guess. But I can only guess, because I’m at least ten retrospectives in, music-related and otherwise. Let’s stick with the music-related. I’m sorry to report that I haven’t arrived at a grand, unifying theory of my 2024 listening experience. Still, more than in recent years, the albums that stuck with me were immersive, escapist or both. Can’t imagine why.

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Photo by Richie Charles

Seeds From the Furthest Vine, the latest Mordecai record, spends 37 minutes disassembling without completely coming apart. The trio plays like a ramshackle miniature train: one moment chugging wildly, tilting and careening, the next tipping back into something like balance, avoiding the wreck. Much of the folkish psychedelia from 2020’s patchy, engrossing Library Music is carried forward. Yet here, Mordecai both raises the intensity of the commotion and channels it into a more structured rock and roll. Seeds from the Furthest Vine, for all its thrashing, tends to find a tuneful coherence in the clatter.

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