Lost in the Trees

“I feel like if God had some sort of way of speaking, it would be through music.” 

That’s Ari Picker in the official press video for A Church That Fits Our Needs — the latest album from Picker’s indie-orchestra collective Lost in the Trees. If all the religious imagery makes the music sound a little grandiose, that’s because it is. In fact, it’s difficult to even classify Lost in the Trees as a touring rock band in any traditional sense. 

Picker himself is a classically-trained composer who studied film scoring at Boston’s Berklee School of Music, and with a living room full of cellos, violins, French horns and tubas, his cinematic approach drowns out any semblance of the DIY folk that his beautiful arrangements build upon. Halfway into a song like album pinnacle “Garden” — with driving strings and trembling choir swells à la Arcade Fire’s Funeral and Picker’s Thom Yorke-esque croon — it’s easy to forget you’re listening to a cut from an independent home-recorded release and not the soundtrack to some tender coming-of-age epic directed by Lasse Halström.

The album’s relentless sentimentalism can be attributed to its heartbreaking backstory. In 2009, Picker lost his mother, who took her own life after years of suffering from depression and mental illness. In this sense, A Church That Fits Our Needs is not only a dedication to Picker’s late mother — “a space for my mother’s soul to go,” he says in the same video — but also a form a therapy for Picker. Lyrically, the album explores both the beauty and ugliness of Picker’s upbringing, allowing him a platform to grieve and find solace in the fragmented memories of his mother.

To be sure, the album shines on its own merit. With the help of his friends, musical colleagues and legendary Elliott Smith producer/collaborator Rob Schnapf, Picker has created an astoundingly personal meditation on nostalgia and loss — a church that fits his own needs, be they creative or therapeutic. 

Poor Moon

Whether you’re a fan of Fleet Foxes’ wistful bucolic harmonies that have become the staple of any respectable coffee shop soundtrack, it’s impossible to dispute that the band takes its music damn seriously.

Enter Poor Moon, the bouncing, pop-minded side-project of Fleet Foxes bassist Christian Wargo and keyboardist Casey Wescott.

Pieced together from a series of demos sent back and forth from Wargo and Wescott to brothers Ian and Peter Murray (the Christmas Cards) during Fleet Foxes’ 2008 tour, Poor Moon’s debut EP Illusion is a delightful collection of pop-rock grooves that land somewhere between the Zombies’ bittersweet witticism and the summertime jangle of the Tornados. 

It’s quite a departure from the duo’s mothership sound, but from the band’s deceptively fun name (it’s taken from the title of Wargo’s favorite Canned Heat song) to its bizarrely photoshopped, yearbook-style press photos, such is to be expected. Having already gained some critical attention, Poor Moon offers a goldmine of clever and efficient indie rock songwriting, and one promising surprise cut from the flannel-print cloth of one of modern folk’s rare mainstream success stories.