Vines makes music that is made for misty days. It’s always just a little bit in the distance, fading into fog and bleary like a half-remembered dream escaping your memory as you come to. The solo project of New York-based multi-instrumentalist and composer Cassie Wieland, Vines operates as a means of reflecting by shrouding; it looks for the answer by going deeper into the well instead of escaping from it. Previous singles show that her music can take on a different form and evokes a different kind of desolation just by altering tempo and reverberation settings. Wieland’s 2023 Birthday Party EP was a fuzzy and glittering reflection on time passed, leaning heavily into the melancholic side of getting older. As her first fully-formed collection of tracks, it opened the cabin door into the figurative woodland she slowly paced about within.
On her debut album, I’ll be here, she continues wandering, the forest still dense and draped in a haar; it’s a ghostly yet ethereal sort of dream pop and shoegaze she conjures. “Happy is hard”, with its campfire crackle and leafy rustle, wanders into a Twin Peaks-like eeriness while “King of swords” and “Tired” take pitch-shifted banjo and embed them among quivering strings and gloomy ambience, like a spectral version of folk music. Working with returning co-producer Mike Tierney, Wieland draws in layers of additional instrumentation (drums, strings, synths, bass, saxophone) that form into dense layers of sometimes impenetrable murkiness.
Where I’ll be here excels is the moments it takes the elements of Wieland’s style and expands them outwards ever so slightly. The hypnotic “Evicted” takes a worried thought (“Am I getting sick / Or am I over it / Am I being born / Or just evicted”) and matches it to an equally hopeless set of piano chords. It’s the sound of someone sinking to the bottom of a lake of depression, currents of distortion and marine-like synths swimming around Wieland as she covers herself in shawls of darker hues. Contrastingly “I’ll be here” closes out the album on an unexpectedly hopeful note, a marching drum propelling a bed of woodwind, wordless vocals, and strings. It aches to go grander, but at the end of an album that is trying to navigate itself out of the mistiness, it’s a trek to a sunnier and clearer surroundings, if not Wieland closing the book on a chapter of her life.
The moments where some light does try to break through also offer moments of respite from the shadows, even if they do come in shorter instrumental passages where another more substantial track would have fit better. “We’ve made it this far” and “Omw” hint at a break in the fogginess, lifting away some shadowy haze and showing at least that there is a path outside of Wieland’s overcast dreamworld. “Undercurrent” casts her in a different setting too, this time on what seems like jagged rocks by the shore, singing out like a siren into the ocean as sea spray crashes about her; the lure is effective though, once again summoning comparisons to Julianna Barwick and Sigur Rós.
While I’ll be here manages to both deepen Wieland’s world as well as reach out to the edges of it, it still feels like it needs that little more honing. She takes stabs at writing songs with more full lyrics (”Tired”, “King of swords”) and draws on the collective talent of accompanying musicians to broaden her soundworld, but still manages to make music that is her own downtrodden pining at the heart of it. Wieland’s dejected, vocoder-laced sentiments are the hook (see “I’m not for myself / I’m for everyone else” as a prime example, or even the crestfallen album title), and it’s a shame she doesn’t trust herself to inject more into the music. Still, it’s alluring stuff like pretty much all of Vines’ output and won’t disappoint any returning listeners hoping for more of her hypnagogic, cushion-like shoegaze. Embrace the surrounding disconsolate mist and you’ll feel at home. As Wieland put in the title, she’ll be right there waiting for you.
