Listen: Saintseneca - "Beast in the Garden"

photo by Olga Pavloska

While Columbus folk collective Saintseneca has largely made a career of encapsulating the various incarnations of folk - be it punk, pop, or rock, singer/songwriter Zac Little sought in the recording and production of their upcoming fourth full length album Pillar of Na to more obviously incorporate different elements of the genre into the record's sound. First single "Frostbiter" saw Little weaving electronic elements into the band's already lushly layered textural palette while "Ladder to the Sun" was a much more straight forward pop-rooted affair. "Beast in the Garden", the third single from the forthcoming record, is a heady dose of 60s inspired psychedelica with Saintseneca's harmonic mesh of stringed instruments effortlessly replicating the Eastern recalling sounds most Bay Area psych bands sought to emulate. Unlike the battering ram that is "Ladder to the Sun", "Beast in the  Garden" is a more meticulously plotted bloom - shifting from sparse guitar to euphoric gang vocal dense choruses. Of the three singles, it's probably the most tied into the album's religious influence. Little is no stranger to weaving the secular with the more evidently biblical, but for "Beast in the Garden" he leans fully into it as he conjures up vibrant images of a life locked out of Paradise. There's a sense of nostalgia, true but there's also an optimism for the new paths ahead and even strange sense of compassion for the solitary sentinel preventing their return. Little's lyricism, through pulled from sacred texts, are less an attempt to pontificate and more an attempt to know, to connect with the idea of a life laid bare in front of you with a daunting amount of freedom. It features stellar arrangements of both traditional and unconventional strings: mandola, hammered dulcimers, violins, viola, and cello. It's another slice of bold musical experimentalism that continues to upend expectations as to what Pillar of Na might sound like as a whole and that to me is terribly exciting.

Pillar of Na, Saintseneca's fourth full length album is out August 31st on ANTI-.