Album Review by Matthew Williams

Nowhere No One Knows Where to Find You begins with its eponymous song, amidst a frenzy of uneasy strings as singer-bassist Natalie Bohrn meditates on her transient lives as a touring artist.

As the tempest unfurls upward, heavy with the feeling of falling apart, Bohrn’s spectral voice conjures the blurring of time and space as her lyrics explore her relationship to place, the tyranny of distance, and the ways motion can charge a body and mind to disintegrate and transform. Those themes float through Nowhere No One Knows Where to Find You, revealed cryptically in fragments over singular, intricate arrangements that marry the earthiness of folk, the blissful wash of dream-pop, and the freedom of jazz. It’s with a heavy tone that Slow Spirit opens their third record—an artwork dense with tension as taut as the nerves and sinew that grant us touch and set us to movement.

In the winter of 2018/19, Bohrn moved with Eric Roberts, whose serpentine guitar work drives the melodic heart of these songs, to Riding Mountain, on the edge of Manitoba’s southernmost National Park. This was the fertile ground, in spite of—or more likely because of—the desolate prairie winter, where the songs that comprise Nowhere No One Knows Where to Find You sprang from and were recorded. The region is radically lush, a far cry from outsider perspectives of Manitoban flatness, home to a dazzling array of wildlife. Out in the woods, surrounded by flora that has seen little intrusion from humans over the past century, Bohrn and Roberts witnessed the complex unfolding of seasons, finding peace in their new home and co-existing with its longtime residents, like the bears who would wander into their yard.

Nowhere No One Knows Where to Find You navigates our eternally changing relationship to environment—one that finds tension and tranquility in equal measure, shifting from one feeling to the other. “Sketchy Symbology” embraces the latter, following the crunch of boots on packed snow with Bohrn’s unadorned vocals, eventually blossoming into a reverb-laden drift, and finally, a loose, wonder-evoking improvisational interlude. Bohrn laments her tendency toward believing in everything—to see each small thing as a sign from the universe—while desiring to embody the deep-rootedness of trees. “States of Disintegration” is jarring, sometimes bordering on abrasive as it explores the inevitability and pain of metamorphosis that time inflicts with its seasons. But comfort comes in the soulful rise of the album’s climax, “To Be Together,” as Bohrn seems to make her peace with the temporal nature of things and foreground what’s truly important: “I don’t know much about where I belong,” she sings. “But I know it feels good to be together.” As the song drifts away, its replaced by a stark, poignant piano coda that recalls the heartbreaking scores of Charlie Kaufman’s most touching films.

Propelled by Justin Alcock’s expressive and incisive drumming—punchy and explosive at times, gentle and elaborate at others—Slow Spirit’s newest work represents monumental artistic growth even for a band whose most recent offering, 2018’s Idle, pushed the boundaries of their sound. Featuring behind-the-boards and on-the-floor contributions from fellow celebrated Manitoban musicians Matt Peters (Royal Canoe) and Matt Schellenberg (Begonia), Nowhere No One Knows Where to Find You is all sonic connective tissue, binding together the transformations that link us, the ones we can’t hold back. It’s a record that encourages listeners to ask themselves: “As the seasons turn, how will I turn gracefully alongside them?”