“I believe the truest love doesn’t always have to last forever” sings Leah Lavigne of Brooklyn quintet Ok Cowgirl on the crushing slow burn of ‘Our Love’, rejecting the traditional impulse to measure a relationship’s worth by how long it lasts and suggesting its gift could be what it teaches us and how it prepares us for what follows in life. It’s a widescreen epic that shifts from intimate, brittle and haunting accompanied by a single guitar strum, into an awesome epiphany, buffeted by waves of fuzz, Lavigne’s aching melody stands tall sinking into your heart in a dramatic crescendo, and oscillating in the mid-point between the emotive dream pop of Mazzy Star, colliding with the crushing choruses of Wednesday; it’s superlative. It comes with a touching video directed by Evan Murray featuring interpretive dance on the beach and into the seawater, it echoes the emotional outpouring of the song, it merely adds to to the touching moment.
Ok Cowgirl will release their debut LP Couldn’t Save Us From My Gut on August 16th via Easy Does It Records and perform an album release show at Brooklyn Made that evening to celebrate the release.
Recorded and produced by Alex Farrar (MJ Lenderman, Indigo De Souza, Wednesday), Couldn’t Save Us From My Gut carries in it a curlicue thread of wild Western ethos – a dare to establish your own law, to venture beyond the world of agreed-upon norms of right and wrong. Enter the country classic: wide open spaces, room to make a big mistake. Existing in that freedom is an attitude frontwoman Leah Lavigne aspires to as much as she struggles with – by her own admission, it’s the “extreme opposite” of how she’s been conditioned.
Each of the album’s 10 tracks finds the band wrangling self-empowerment in various contexts – romantic love, societal obligation, how merciless a day in America can be – and working to parse their truth from a tangle of inherited noise. But the record’s title is something of an admission of success: Ok Cowgirl have started living by their code, and they’re not likely to quit.
