CHERUBINE: how long do i have left with my dog?

♱𓆩❦︎𓆪♱ AUGUST SINGLE RELEASE ROUNDUP

With a fresh Mercury retrograde and Uranus tensions, August past was a period underpinned by the notion of a hero’s journey’s victorious end. Mars rekindled with Libra, followed by Leo embracing Venus, evoking a climate of peaceful union if earnestly worked for. Change has opened like a lily to the deserving daughters who have watered it.

Beneath gracious heavens, a compendium of sweet singles have blossomed on the banks of August:

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LUVCAT- “Blushing”

The desire that courses through Luvcat’s existing discography is wine red, shrouded by leopard print and filtered by lace. On Blushing however, Liverpool musician Sophie Morgan spotlights a pinkish tenderness that fuels the frippery.

The Luvcat persona, a circus-bred dilettante of lipstick and pearls portrayed by Morgan, is exhibited aesthetically by the record’s existing singles however Blushing justifies her vaudevillian depth.

Morgan took to instagram to share that the track almost didn’t make the cut for Luvcat’s forthcoming debut LP Vicious Delicious, however was reprieved by it’s accretive bridge, “the last thing i wrote for this album & it kinda sums up this wild ride of the past couple years”. Vicious Delicious’s penultimate track honours Morgan’s, and in tandem the palimpsest that is Luvcat’s, origins and is a theatrical reflection of love’s ability to upturn a world.

LUCY DACUS- “More Than Friends”

Pried from the chipped-polish hands of avid Lucy Dacus fans as an long-unreleased deep cut, More Than Friends is riddled with quotidian intimacy, a ubiquitous penchant of Dacus’s.

Dacus has never ceased to be scathingly vulnerable in her work, regularly drawing from personal journal entries and publicly immortalising her more recent intimacies on March’s angelic Forever Is A Feeling. The album, which More Than Friends is a revived darling of, is an anthology comprised almost entirely of sweetly sincere love songs; the paradigm of a love song is starkly one she’d never once undertaken beforehand for earnestness’s sake. In her writing, Dacus’s unflinching eye for detail is a love language, recalling the minutiae of a new beginning; “Just a mattress on the floor and an empty pizza box / in an empty room, in an empty house / under a crescent moon”, her perception rooting in ephemera of the ordinary, the seeds of change’s fruit.

Serving as an epilogue to Forever Is A Feeling, “More Than Friends” surrenders to the serendipity of another; “but i looked at you, and i felt dumb / ‘cause i trusted you without trying to”.

ABBY POWLEDGE- “ruin me”

The single cover for ruin me features an ornate teacup and saucer, hand-painted by Abby Powledge herself. The rising folk sweetheart imbues ruin me with her ever-tender reflections on intimacy, and the futility of attempting to curate it for protection; “you never really met me / truly met me face to face”.

Fresh off opening on tour for Sydney Rose of We Hug Now fame, ruin me examines Powledge’s predilection for concealing tokens of her true self to eliminate the risk of them falling victim to change; “said my second favorite songs, my second favorite drinks / wore the clothes i might outgrow ‘cause your cologne would always sting”. Each rising strum of Powledge’s pre-chorus strips her of convicted costume, sweetening the taste for her lovers’ tongue just as much her own. As established by her still-life, coziness cradles a half-truth.

The track ultimately laments Powledge having dug a moat around the cornerstones of her identity so deeply that not even pure intentions can traverse. Her sonorous lilts stream over a folky landscape, and with release, knock the teacup over; “guess I’m changing anyway and could’ve salvaged something worthy”.

LUNA DAY- “Somebody Else”

A fluttering Omnichord drags the listener down through a trapdoor and into the candlelit theatre of Luna Day for a sixth time. Drenched in vampiric flair, Day’s Somebody Else tears the next page from the LA newcomer’s blood-soaked memoir.

The gothic blueprint of Luna Day’s oeuvre is refreshing in that it’s diaristic teenage-girl-bedroom songwriting (think the generalised pursuers of which Darcie Haven, Gracie Abrams etc.) is rebirthed beneath buttresses, architecturally antipathetic from her predecessors. Day seeks to carve out a confessional booth for melodramatists, vampiric freaks, Morrissey apologists, and for those whom the cardinal yearning of their youth manifests as blood-red desire.

Day continuously proves acrobatic vocal ability, contorting her warble for a bridge dripping in B-horror, “I can feel the shift, it’s like I’m coming alive / and with your kiss, I’m powerless / oh, when your lips are on mine”. Potential is ever-palpable and pulpy for Day’s future successes, with Somebody Else conducting a clandestine affair between chaos and control with grandeur.

SAMIA- “Pool- Stripped”

Originally released as the opening track for her 2020 album The Baby, Pool-Stripped comes in response to Samia’s tiny desk performance of the ballad, gaining recent traction for it’s unfiltered and wounding pleas.

Pool-Stripped mourns the enigmatic inevitability of change. For the track’s original production, desperation is submerged by phantasmagoric synths for listeners to coolly run their fingers through, observing Samia’s mourning from the touch tank. In the acoustic rendition however, the listener is deprived of such voyeurism and is cast into the deep end. How long do you have left with your dog? Are your legs gonna last? No matter martyr or monarch, of us can stay underwater forever; Samia grieves this certainty “how long do you think we can sit here / before we have to move?”

It’s as this certainty dawns that a tiptoeing piano once glinting over sustained electric guitar capitulates to pounding, just as the sunken begins yielding to change and counting their breaths. It’s in naming and acknowledging that temporality has no tangible counterpart that Samia waves to listeners from the surface, echoing a reminder that they will indeed have to come up for air.

We’ve lassoed the sounds of August for CHERUBINE’s cherished debut. My sweet sacred music column! September’s fillies are abound and album reviews aplenty are lying in wait- I’d love to have you again. ❦