{"id":850875,"date":"2026-09-17T11:00:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T11:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/850875\/"},"modified":"2026-09-17T11:00:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T11:00:10","slug":"curbside-lambsear-put-rings-on-all-my-fingers-to-weigh-down-my-hands-ep-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/850875\/","title":{"rendered":"Curbside Lambsear: Put Rings on All My Fingers to Weigh Down My Hands EP Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Curbside Lambsear<\/a> means nothing. As a band name, it\u2019s drawn from a photo Magdalena McLean posted on Instagram a few years ago\u2014of a lamb\u2019s-ear plant that was growing next to a curb\u2014and does not really necessitate interrogation. But wow, what a phrase to say out loud! There\u2019s no band I\u2019d rather speak the name of right now: Those consonant clusters give the tongue a real workout, bring back Proustian memories of spelling bees and schoolyard riddles.<\/p>\n

When I say Curbside Lambsear are wordy, I don\u2019t mean in a literal sense. Maybe I\u2019d describe them as wordsy: as in, headsy about words. Just listen to the title of their debut EP: Put Rings on All My Fingers to Weigh Down My Hands. The construction practically encourages you to swing it as you say it out loud: Put Rings on-All-My Fingers to Weigh Down My Hands. McLean and her bandmate Annabelle M\u00f6dlinger say they write lyrics together, phrase by phrase, meaning their songs don\u2019t contain full narratives; what they lack in discrete stories they more than make up for in structural beauty. When one of them intones that \u201cNo ordinary word makes the world fit right into the palms of me\/No ordinary word makes the world makes the world makes the world,\u201d I have no idea what they might be referring to\u2014but it\u2019s easy to lurch into the pessimistic beauty of the whole thing.<\/p>\n

No score yet, be the first to add.<\/p>\n

Viola player McLean and synth player M\u00f6dlinger were both born in Austria, but became friends in London as members of sparky art-rock band the Umlauts<\/a>. McLean also performs in Caroline<\/a> as a violinist and co-vocalist, and an understanding of that band is helpful in parsing the aesthetic world of Curbside Lambsear, which similarly manages to blend elements of drone and noise into a world that still feels pretty and pastoral.<\/p>\n

Most frequently, Curbside Lambsear\u2019s music recalls the work of Tirzah<\/a> and Mica Levi<\/a> in its willingness to find grooves in harsh environs (as on \u201cAvril\u201d) or to contrast sweet, almost childlike vocal takes with dubby, decaying production (\u201cUneasy\u201d). Caroline\u2019s Jasper Llewellyn drums on four out of the EP\u2019s five songs, adding tense, leaden improvised-sounding percussion to \u201cJjochstubn\u201d and aggressive, dissonant cymbal to \u201cAvril\u201d that pull Rings away from the realm of NTS-core pastoral pop and into harsher, more full-throated territory. The overall effect is heady and hypnotic\u2014a set of songs that tickle the back wall of your stomach and the soles of your feet thanks to their dense, churning environments.<\/p>\n

And then there are the lyrics, which most often function, like McLean and M\u00f6dlinger\u2019s instruments, as rhythmic and textural elements. On \u201cUneasy,\u201d the song\u2019s sole couplet\u2014\u201cOn the off chance it\u2019s true I\u2019m uneasy like you\/While the beat softly shatters some things just don\u2019t matter\u201d\u2014gives the song a rhythmic framework when it could otherwise fade into ambient mush. On \u201cAvril,\u201d they repeat the line \u201cFunny I\u2019m that,\u201d and it feels like a lifeline among relentless industrial noise, even as the words quickly begin to feel like disembodied sounds. This is hardly throwaway lyricism, of course\u2014it\u2019s just that the words themselves don\u2019t matter as much as how they\u2019re being delivered and how they\u2019re interacting with the rest of the music.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Curbside Lambsear means nothing. As a band name, it\u2019s drawn from a photo Magdalena McLean posted on Instagram…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":850876,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[776,88,216,777],"class_list":["post-850875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-albums","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/850875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=850875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/850875\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/850876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=850875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=850875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=850875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}