Stream: Mikal Cronin, ‘Shelter’

Kevin Bronson on September 27th, 2019

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To find inspiration for his new album “Seeker,” singer-songwriter Mikal Cronin retreated from the bustle of Los Angeles and touring to the relative peace of the San Jacinto Mountains. He spent a month in a cabin near Idyllwild with his cat, Ernie — only to be forced to flee the area with his instruments and gear when the Cranston Fire threatened the area and forced evacuations.

“It was so quiet and peaceful,” Cronin recalls in announcement for the album, which is out Oct. 25 on Merge Records. “I got weird looks at the store. I got bug bites that didn’t heal for months. I walked around a small lake a few times. I wrote. I took literally something that’s usually a hypothetical, something every artist thinks about doing. It worked.

“I was looking for something: answers, direction, peace,” he adds simply. “I am the seeker.”

Once back in L.A., Cronin took the demos into at Palmetto Studios in Los Angeles, where, working with engineer Jason Quever and backed by members of Ty Segall’s Freedom band, he crafted his most sophisticated, emotionally probing and darkest album yet, and one that transcends usual power-pop/garage-rock/psych-pop tropes.

“Seeker” swells and recedes with strings, horns and choirs of background vocals. While a smattering of songs are (for Cronin) straight-ahead, that’s not the case with the opener “Shelter,” a rhythmically challenging and heavily layered track that lays out the album’s thesis in the first verse: “Seeker always finds an answer / it may not be the one you want / but there’s a wisdom to the contact / of meeting something that you’re not.”

The song is a harbinger. The album is full of nuances that suggest, even to longtime Cronin followers, he’s found something that he’s not, or wasn’t previously. Stay tuned for more.

||| Stream: “Shelter”