The lovable, catchy, sonic essay, December 32nd, from Portland’s scrappy alt-folk purist and film school student, AC Sapphire, will be one of the best albums released this year or any year. It is one of the very tallest trees in the current musical forest, one the coolest and most drinkable springs in the present day audio desert, and one of the truest and best musical friends you can make in this duplicitous internet sociosphere.
This is an album that lives with you in your fixer-upper life like an artist in residence with carpentry skills. All ten songs tug at your heartstrings like wet-nosed rescue puppies eager to make your home theirs. The wildwood flower freshness in AC Sapphire’s voice will make you long for just one more June afternoon in Yosemite. The sassy poetic gravitas in her lyrics will metrically ring in your frosted, sweaty head when you snowshoe, awash in mixed metaphors, at Mt. Shasta. Her frailing banjo twangle will tickle you as you fold toddler laundry, plan your next brunch, and revise your thesis.
It’s hard to say too many good things about AC and this well-produced, supremely sung, and masterfully played, recording. Every song is real enough to live in, every musical choice bold enough to slap. The song we’re presenting today, “Chaparral Bottoms” was written about AC’s long-time friend and trusted collaborator, the great Victoria Williams, and was crafted for you with background Mojave coyotes haunting the agate twilight.
If you are a discerning music fan– and I know you are– you will move quickly to purchase, listen to, lose yourself in, and begin planning your future with, AC Sapphire’s diamond ring of an album, Dec. 32nd, out March 8 on American Standard Time Records.
