The heavens open up and God's hairy forearm shoots forth from the clouds, slapping the word SONGWRITER across your body's fragile avatar. And now the question: is it a calling or is it a curse? Will you draw the sword from the lake, victorious and gleaming? Or will your skin crawl with boils, your crops alight in conflagration? Is the habit of songwriting something rewarding and nutritive, like gardening? Or is it more of a dirty tic, like bumming a cigarette every time you drink two beers? Is writing songs a job? A holy duty? Or is it just an occasionally rewarding hobby for the upper-middle-class-and-above hoodlums of the world? And if I do heed my destiny, laid out for me by the Higher Power of words and melody, just how the fuck am I supposed to pay for healthcare?

Such are the celestial backyard wrestling matches that make up Asheville, NC project Sinai Vessel’s fourth LP, like Jacob and the angel on the riverbank. I SING, what a phrase – at once a church basement support group confession, a future epic epitaph, and a hilarious thing to imagine printed huge on a t-shirt or as a warning on the vest of a particularly nervous service dog. Chief songwriter Caleb Cordes sings, which in the record’s first tracks both "doesn't matter" and happens "for a reason." Delicious tension! Which way, country-western man?

One gets the sense that this struggle would dematerialize if it wasn't for the fact that the Sinai Vessel project contains some truly excellent, surprising, brilliant, and even funny Songs (funny's the hardest one to do) – if the lyrics sucked, the gears might grind a little less, he could maybe even hang up his chainmail once and for all. But face it, Cordes! You seem ordained to write a couplet. Consider the intimate, novelistic awe of "Birthday" – Raymond Carver could never. Or the subtle economic panic of "Dollar," which elegantly paints a vivid watercolor of a car swerved off the road beneath the ambient terror of the tumbling of the market. "Horses are all the time trampling fruit inside my mind making strawberry wine that grows sour" is just one of two dozen unbelievable zingers I could pull. For my money, "ten years eating shit and going back for seconds" has got to be one of the best opening lines I have ever heard. Damn, maybe he really is called to the craft!

But how to capture the prophetic verse? Enter longtime collaborator Bennett Littlejohn (Hovvdy, Claire Rousay) for artful and subtly slick co-production, painting Sinai Vessel in all its prismatic flavors: Welch-style wrenching acoustic ditties, a touch of the best Death Cab albums, a deconstructed bossa nova, a down-the-middle Waffle House jukebox Nashville stomper (featuring some very Pro pedal steel from Jodi's Nick Levine), and – perhaps most surprisingly – Deftones-adjacent, whisper-sung heaviness that flutters into the room like a lost bird. Each stylistic dare is a challenge aced by a Wrecking Crew of a rhythm section: Littlejohn’s contributions on thumping bass and Andrew Stevens’ performance on drums (here returning after a masterful showing on Sinai Vessel’s own Ground Aswim) allow the record’s swings to land, grounding the plaintive intimacy of Cordes’ bedroom-recorded vocals in a confident, expanded world. Picture Sparklehorse fronting the Heartbreakers at their most ironclad, or just listen to “Best Witness” – the crown jewel of a writing season wherein Cordes was openly attempting to pen the best and most accessible songs of his career.

The visual world of this record is worth discussing, as well – Sinai Vessel has formed an unusually synergetic pairing with Atlanta photographer Trent Wayne, whose uncanny, flash-heavy, high-contrast images lend a surreal jester's privilege perspective that matches the unflinching realism of the songs. Cordes describes the dread weather of late-stage capitalism, Wayne captures the sprawling empty highways and empty storefronts that are its harbingers. Check out the video for "Laughing" – rarely have I ever seen a song's vibe so well-matched.

Do you know the song "Treatment Bound" by the Replacements? It's kind of a mirthful, final fuck you to the listener on one of their drunkest albums, and is the pinnacle of their "one foot in the door / one foot in the gutter" vibe. There's something of that energy on I SING – it's got a DIY lifer's gallows humor as Cordes tries to carve out a niche in stone with a grapefruit spoon, speaking truth to streaming royalties and trust fund powers. Crucially, though, Sinai Vessel never says "fuck you" to the listener – instead Cordes shakes his head, laughing, and says instead "fuck me," like he just can't believe what he's seeing. How preposterous it is to be yoked to the song, how silly that we and our friends get together and squeeze considered noise into plastic, how absolutely goofy is it that any of us listen, that any of us are moved. And in some unlikely screwball miracle, within the vanishing middle class vocation of singing for your supper, Sinai Vessel achieves the improbable: grace, resonance, a truly great collection of tunes.

— Ben Seretan