Jesusfreakhideout.com: Joseph Cutshall, "Stay Close" Review

JFH Indie Review

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Joseph Cutshall
Stay Close

Street Date: October 27, 2023
Style: Folk Rock
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Buy It: Bandcamp

A couple years ago, I was in limbo. It's a long story; the short version is that my faith had more or less disappeared (born and raised evangelical Christian) while I was working at a church as the facilities maintenance guy. It was rough, but I wouldn't take it back. I learned how to live with uncertainty, which is essentially the survival skill that has gotten me through the past few years. It was a crude baptism into something of a new life for me, but it felt like dying - or as close as I've personally experienced.

"It's gonna come down in fire / It's gonna come down in waves / It's gonna feel like you're dying / It's gonna feel like you're saved." These words from the title track of Joseph Cutshall's Stay Close are dancing with paradox: fire and water, death and deliverance. It's being unable to identify what the good news is and what the bad news is. What feels like a tragedy might ultimately be a blessing or an invitation into something better than you could've imagined. Maybe it's a calling that you're tempted to run from. Jonah, where's that boat going? This tension animates Cutshall's debut album: eleven songs written during the 2020 quarantine, which was (in his own words) "a deep season of self-doubt and personal reckoning."

Musically, this album feels right at home with indie singer/songwriter contemporaries, but I feel like I'm not all that familiar with some of the older influences that Cutshall might be pulling from. That being said, some of the aesthetic inclinations here remind me of when I would help my dad with car repairs listening to classic rock on the garage radio, although it pushes much further into the atmospheric and expansive. Come to think of it, there are moments where it conjures the vaguely nostalgic euphoria I feel when I listen to Bon Iver's "Beth/Rest." Cutshall performed and recorded everything on the album except for the excellent drumming by Tyler Cuchiara, which is quite astounding considering the lushness and complexity of the arrangements, beautifully mixed by Dave Wilton at Coalesce Audio.

As I mentioned earlier, the themes of spiritual reckoning here bear an acute resonance with my story, and as someone who recently released an album exploring similar subject matter, it's inspiring to observe how someone in a completely different life stage processed his doubt and pain through music. Among the common threads here is this idea that life will eventually break you open and your meaning-making system will no longer be able to contain all that you've experienced. When this happens, you're confronted with a choice: Do you knuckle down and stay the course? Do you force yourself into believing what you think you're supposed to believe? Do you abandon it entirely? Or do you find another way to deal with the dissonance?

God has seemed silent to me my whole life. I think that's why the title track on Stay Close cuts deep, where Cutshall recounts quiet mornings spent in spiritual discipline that never seem to amount to anything. For certain folks in religious circles, it's a common experience - that feeling of futility, beating your fist to a pulp on a door that rarely opens, with no sign of reciprocation for the devotion. "If you'd die just to reach me / What are you waiting for?"

Cutshall sings about a bleaker instance of God's silence on "South of West," which reads like a modern psalm mourning the loss of a loved one: "What I'd say if I could reach you / Wouldn't put a d*mn thing right / There's snow on the horizon now." It's that overwhelming sense of helplessness and abandonment where one almost hopes that, if there is a god, he's merely powerless rather than being cruel or indifferent. The cold settles in.

While there's a lot of soul-searching here, there's also a strong familial undercurrent. For instance, "Bury Me Deeper" is an indie folk love song, but it's the kind of love song that could only be written by someone who has experienced the depth of sticking with another person through hardship, "Press into my arms like the roots of the pines / Growing deeper to carry the earth." The first track, the soulful heartland rocker "You Will Find," is addressed to Cutshall's daughter, singing about the strange cocktail of joy and trepidation that comes with bringing new life into a brutal world.

This is where the heart of Stay Close lies: trying to reconcile the harsh reality of life's often abject cruelty with a God who is supposed to provide some kind of balm or sense of meaning. And make no mistake, there aren't any answers here; there is, however, a prevailing faith that hope is worthwhile. There are moments where Cutshall seems to be trying to convince himself that this is true, repeating "Do not fear / For the light will come" like a mantra. Ultimately, maybe that faith is more of a constant choice than anything rooted in some kind of unwavering belief. The desire to control uncontrollable things will only steal whatever joy is left.

"There's a current in this river / Something I could never hold / And there is beauty in resistance / But there is strength in letting go." This excerpt from "Breaking at the Bones" reminds me of something Wendell Berry wrote, which I've kept close ever since a friend shared it with me earlier this year: "It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings."

A couple years ago, I was in limbo. I still am, but the difference is that I've made peace with living there. It's sort of nice this time of the year, actually.

- Review date: 12/29/23, written by Nick Webber for Jesusfreakhideout.com

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JFH Staff's Second Opinion

Stay Close, the self-produced debut album from Boulder, Colorado's Joseph Cutshall, is a yearning exploration of the difficulties of maintaining one's faith when the felt nearness of God becomes a rarity - or worse, only a distant memory. Mixing messages of doubt and hope in equal measure, the resulting LP is the perfect release for these winter months, wrapping listeners in a warm blanket of ambient indie rock that will readily appeal to fans of artists such as Copeland, John Mark McMillan, Benjamin Daniel, or Cutshall's main project, A Boy & His Kite. These eleven songs are often unassuming; on a first pass, you might think that this is merely great background music, but after a few listens, you'll be surprised how the subtly cutting lyrics and deceptively memorable melodies have crept up on you. If Stay Close has one notable flaw, it's Cutshall's tendency to sing the first half of a song low before jumping up an octave, and his lower register (albeit pleasant) struggles to cut through the mix with any punch or clarity. It would be a shame if these slow starts caused any listeners to miss how strong the second-halves of these songs are or how powerful Cutshall's higher register is, including his Bon Iver-like falsetto revealed on "Now Till the End of Time." The lovely John Mayer-esque guitar solo on the title track is one of the few moments where Cutshall flexes the fact that his main gig is being a lead guitarist; in most instances, he allows pads, piano, and acoustic guitar to craft and carry the beautiful soundscapes of each track. As these fifty-one minutes reach their sonically- and thematically-cohesive conclusion, it becomes undeniably clear that Cutshall is a talented multi-instrumentalist who truly desires to bear his heart and explore his own doubts in order to provide comfort and hope to his listeners. God might not always feel close, but this album reminds us to stay close to one another, so that God can reveal his own closeness through the closeness of God's people. - Review date: 12/29/23, written by Chase Tremaine of Jesusfreakhideout.com