While sitting on  a 3-hour flight heading to beloved wilderness for a few days, listening to Corvus Corone’s ‘Abandoned In Spring’ brought me unbidden tears, a grief unspoken I know not for what. What I write is personal; I don’t do it for a living. I may not express it well but my words carry something of me. Some of my posts are more, much more, so than the rest. This is one which is. Many are discomfited when confronted with what is personal to someone else. There is neither good nor bad in being impersonal or in opening up. If you belong to that category which gets uncomfortable, then perhaps abandon any further foray into this post. But I would still strongly recommend listening to the music and for that you could jump to the last parts of the post where the links are.

What is your guiding, perhaps overriding, emotion; one that you feel the most closely bound to? Mine is grief and my tie with it has grown stronger as I have aged. It might well have been anger instead and it was in my youth till the extreme expression of it one day shocked me to a stop.  Mercifully. Better tears than blood, better gut-wrenching music than torn muscle. Having said that, my bond with grief doesn’t make me a gloomy person; quite to the contrary. It helps me value the beauty around us, often in little or common things that most would ignore. The knowledge that it will not be forever, neither that object of my wonder nor I, fuels both grief and a deep appreciation of existence. “The Sun Shall Die With None To Mourn” as Corvus Corone laments on this album may not have this dual thought in mind in its creation (or maybe it did) but the sorrow at what may come to pass is expressed in it to stunning effect. Every single song in the set – three epics bookended by what to my mind are a prologue and an epilogue – lends credence to my belief that pain and sorrow produce the greatest art. The music is created with strong feeling but it is also carefully crafted. It is precisely composed music that is essentially instrumental where the human voice too comes in as an instrument at the right time to add texture and gravitas and to release the deliberately built-up tension. Even without explicit words to cloud your mind, you feel the depth of emotion.

In my head this album’s full title – with no disrespect to the band – is ‘Born In Winter, Abandoned In Spring’.

‘Abandoned In Spring’ is a deep, slow, long lament, a thing of excruciating beauty. It’s an album which is that increasingly rare thing, a deeply personal work of art that though created by someone else becomes fiercely your own in expression. Different from Hammock’s ‘Mysterium’ in sound but similar in effect. Not everyone will get that, of course. This is not music that you will likely feel for if sorrow hasn’t coloured your life. And I am genuinely happy for you if that is true. But for those that do, I hope you find catharsis, a relief and release in this.

Please do listen to this outstanding piece of music! You can stream or buy it (I hope the latter as well) on Bandcamp from the embedded section below. If you like this, you might be interested in the other releases of Canadian independent label, Syrup Moose Records too.

You can stream the album here too:

Tidal: https://tidal.com/browse/album/269859245

Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/in/album/abandoned-in-spring/1662999845

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/4SaR7ccYBIADQ4JPxSEVJg?si=unLvmw6tTa6MhrHbqD-yZw