Strand of Oaks, HEAL: Album Review

     Timothy Showalter, also known as Strand of Oaks, truly dug deep to unearth HEAL, his most popular Strand of Oaks album to date. Dissatisfaction with his previous album, Dark Shores, led Showalter to this incredible project, as HEAL investigates and brings to life Showalter’s innermost demons, and the most painfully passionate of his sensitivities. An unnervingly raw and exposed musical creation, HEAL is gritty and tortured, yet it also contains glimmers of hope, resulting in an impressive patchwork of emotional extremes.

     I have yet to find a really bad review of HEAL, as even those who do not appreciate its full insight understand that Showalter’s collection of tunes, synths, beats, tones, and absolute shred-sessions on guitar is a uniquely attractive and intriguing one. Born and raised in Goshen, Indiana, Showalter includes nostalgic reflections of his youth on HEAL, particularly with songs like “Goshen ‘97”, in which he details growing up, discovering rock and rock, and dealing with his teenage angst. But HEAL isn’t just a collection of childhood memories; in its entirety, it resembles more of a memoir.

     Showalter seems to organize his album in order from childhood. Beginning with “Goshen ‘97”, he continues on to include grief and sentiments about his strained relationship with his ex-wife, who cheated on him, an incident in which his home burnt down and left him homeless for a period of time, and a near-death experience in a car accident just days before creating the bulk of HEAL, in which he broke every rib on the right side of his body and experienced a serious concussion. HEAL is Showalter’s honest and jolting expression of these challenges.

     With musical catharsis to help him, the song “HEAL” from this album seems to be Showalter insistently urging himself to heal and recover from life’s hurtles.  It’s almost a manifestation of his conscience, pure and unaltered, speaking to him through a current of sound. With the song “Same Emotions”, Showalter seems to demand personal reflection, undercurrents of anger and frustration becoming obvious as the song progresses. The crafting of these songs to convey a sonic build similar to the way emotions build and shift is admirable enough, but the sounds Showalter professionally combines are also so engaging that the songs become breath-taking.

     The songs “Mirage Year”, “Wait for Love”, and “Plymouth” are definitely more wistful and sad. “Mirage Year” and “Wait for Love” seem to focus on the heartbreaking, shattering despair Showalter faced with his ex-wife’s affair, although “Mirage Year” communicates a more muted, overbearing sadness than the agonizing and piercing anguish of “Wait for Love”. Meanwhile, “Plymouth” seems to be more of a pensive and melancholy contemplation of how that grief immediately began to weigh him down and take everything from him. Together, these songs all share a deep heaviness that is both sharp and penetrating as well as sluggish and infectious, affecting the listener in the way that only raw and honestly crafted music can.

     More fierce and jarring is the song “For Me”, which sounds like all of Showalter’s distress and anger and angst piled into one track. His descriptions of how his entire world fell apart are so grating, upfront, and damn real that it’s hard not to become righteously angry along with him. His eventual progression into shouting the chorus is powerful enough to inspire a frenzy. But perhaps the most potent section of the album occurs toward the middle.

     Showalter’s fourth song, “Shut In”, is unique in that it sounds like the most hopeful song on the album. It encourages visions of travel, Into the Wild-style, and ‘moving on’, as Showalter talks about losing his faith, making realizations about his life, and trying to make amends with all that has tortured him by leaving it behind and focusing on the future. It seems to be Showalter deciding to look past the burdens of the present, even if they are hard to see beyond. Directly after “Shut In” is the track “Woke up to the Light”, which follows this trend of moving forward, but implies that Showalter doesn’t intend to let go of his past completely because it is part of him, and he will eventually find peace regardless. The harmonizing singing directly after the chorus sounds almost spiritual in its resigned faith, placing this song at a delicate balance between gloomy and optimistic. Finally, following “Woke up to the Light”, comes the song that indisputably elevates HEAL to complete masterpiece status: “JM”.

     Never has a song been so earth-shattering as “JM”. Beginning softly and quietly, it is an unsuspecting jam, but holy shit, does it jam. It is not a song to listen to nonchalantly; it is not just a background song heard in the grocery store. “JM” demands full attention and focus. The song’s title comes from the initials of Showalter’s musical hero, Jason Molina, who died in 2013. The song itself, however, feels like an accumulation of every tragedy ever, giving “JM” a violently haunting and anguished energy. The chorus is intense and heart-stopping, magnified by sudden switches from deathly quiet to ear-splitting sonic surges. The guitar is tormented and excruciating, and the most defining part of the song is when Showalter barks a chilling shout before descending into a mind-blowing tangent of epic guitar shredding. The dangerous, electric thrill of the entire song inspires quivers of energy, transforming “JM” into a song that most likely functioned as a total purge of negative energy for Showalter. Strangely, the hell-bent song ends softly, stirring up a sense of purity and feelings of being cleansed, shrouding the track in awe-inspiring mystique.

     With such a mixture and range of emotion and sound, Timothy Showalter of Strand of Oaks manages to craft a magnificent album that listeners can be consumed by. Its intimacy, derived from being such a personal album for Showalter, is appealing because it makes HEAL seem authentic and genuine. He succeeds in crafting music with enough depth to instantly be a favorite here on The Deep End.