Midwinter is barely anyone’s favorite time of year, but Boston duet Otter used the season as their first album’s namesake and muse when they dropped Midwinter on Saturday, the 2019 winter solstice. With hopes of making songs that sound like the arc of winter, Donna Vatnick and Jason Kimball, who make up Otter, have stumbled into a musical atmosphere as delicate, special, and quiet as winter’s first snow.
Crickets chirp, birds talk, and synths steadily hover throughout the tracks on this six song sonic collection. Vatnick and Kimball include field recordings of snow falling (don’t skimp out on the last thirty seconds of “first snow”) and grass pulling in order to feed the organic, wintery sounds on this record, and pulled inspiration from, what they described as “the drag of midwinter, the grey, and the step-by-step head-down get-to-work cover-your-face experience.” Lyrically, these songs touch on familiar New England landscapes: migration, cold chests, crispy brown grass, short days, and darkening skies that open up for long nights. They are poems over music that have ripened like winter fruit, perfect for the season.
The album’s first track, “migration,” introduces the airy, melodic guitar and bird calls that persist throughout the album. Vatnick’s voice, while it muses on freedom, carries a melancholic twinge. Then “passage” gives us forty seconds of pure winter in field recording form. After, “first snow” with it’s synth-y, bright but quiet harmonies, like something you’d find on a Freelance Whales album, simply captures the sound of how winter feels, as Vatnick sings: “first snow/covers up the world/brings you/closer to your lonesome self.”
Vatnick sited familial sacrifices on the the title track. “‘Midwinter’ captures a feeling in a stagnant day in winter where I was trying to appreciate the sacrifices my family has made for me to be here and have what I have, especially my mom,” she said. “This song was the first time I’ve dared to confront my gratitude toward her while also holding a sense of grief for what we may have both lost.” Kimball says it’s heavy, while balancing a call to action to retain your inner child.
Next, the particularly poetic, “for the one who won’t return” features Vatnick’s whispered words and textured, vocal echoes over Kimball’s deep guitar pickings. For a track that doesn’t even scrape the two minute marker, it delivers an undeniable sense of grief and longing. In fact, according to the band, all of the songs on Midwinter work as a space to explore and excavate “some of the hard to reach spaces like aging parents, transience of memory, death, grief, love, and home.” Finally “sunreturns,” the final song on the album, plays like a lullaby, with crickets keeping time.
On Midwinter, Otter’s songwriting style is like snow—in the right conditions, “whatever sticks generally stays,” Kimball says. “We never wrote songs trying to say anything specifically. We just sort of write in a stream of consciousness kind of way.”
The duo met perhaps “in a past life,” according to Vatnick, “and we must have been sisters,” but also, like any other millennial duo, might, on Tinder. The couple’s likeness to their band’s mammalian namesake is striking: brunettes that “sing to each other and float on each other’s bellies for a while until they can swim on their own.”
However, they came to know musicianship in vastly different ways. Whereas Kimball “never found the type of music that felt true” and was “just too intimidated” to play and produce music in a meaningful way before forming Otter, Vatnick learned to play guitar with her dad when she was fourteen, and has since become more vocal about writing songs with the encouragement of friends, Strawberry Machine (her other band), and her parents. When the two play together, however, the duo forms a single spirit. “When we hit some heavier challenges in our lives both separately and with each other, we found that writing songs was our glue. It just shifted the walls, and opened us up in ways we didn’t expect. Music was the easiest way for us to spend time together, it was just effortless,” Otter says.
After a year of working on Midwinter, the album was mastered by the band’s friend Casey Dawson in the first snowstorm of 2019. Just in time for the winter solstice, it brings the warmth that accompanies two people loving something in unison. It feels as short as the shortest day, while giving us “ample time for reflection that comes with long nights, perhaps lonely and nostalgic nights.” It brings the listener from feeling the pitted heartbreak of “the birds who don’t make it when they fly back,” to “the magic of snow,” up to an inevitable “emerging out of the numbness into the return of the sun.”
You can stream Midwinter in full below (via Bandcamp).