Half Shadow – At Home With My Candles

At Home With My Candles, Half Shadow’s third LP is an album of mythopoetic paeans to the domestic uncanny—the mysterious and unseen worlds experienced at home. Recorded almost entirely in quarantine, the record’s songs chart the beauty and strangeness that domestic life can conjure, at once ordinary and utterly mystical. Long the enigmatic moniker of Portland’s Jesse Carsten, Half Shadow’s new songs expand the project’s intimate poetics into something more expansive and encompassing, without ever losing a sense of tenderness. Intimate folk songs magnify into anthemic chant-alongs, lo-fi dirges, and primal pop experiments. Genres blend with a subtly psychedelic grace, with Carsten’s voice delivering dream-laden poems always at the center of the sound. Listeners are sung into an interiorized sphere: an otherworldly landscape of tension, languor, and mystery. From the place of home a whole cosmos fans out.

Taking its cues from the surrealists, and especially Leonora Carrington, whose famous self-portrait inspired the lead off track (“Inn of the Dawn Horse”), the album’s lyrics welcome dream logic and non-linearity as central tenets of their make-up. Like the fractured, domestic narratives of Maya Deren’s oceanic films, or the strange, liminal interiors of Dorothea Tanning’s paintings, these songs eschew conventional extraversion, instead revealing subtler stratas of the domestic. Home becomes a portal to the imaginal: painted in all the vivid and occasionally unsettling colors of the unconscious realm. Eternity grows from the psychedelic soil of the yard (“Song for the Garden”), enigmatic presences stalk a darkened bedroom (“In My Room (A Creature Approaches)”), and a lover’s whispered voice opens the entryway to a clandestine beach (“Flame (Flower in the Air)”). As in so many dreams, landscape and interiority blend, revealing an elemental world, that while unpredictable, is full of beauty and visceral emotion.