Family Ravine - Wet Lands Dry Me (2025)

Kevin Cahill returns to Death is Not the End with another saturated suite of cosmic folk outpourings made on guitar, lap steel, melodica and karimba.

We loved Cahill's last album, 2024's '(I​'ll) Waltz In And Act Like (I) Own The Place', and the multi-instrumentalist follows that fuzzy set of Takoma-inspired meditations with 'Wet Lands Dry Me', an even more faded, almost ambient murmuration. Sounding as if it's been recorded directly to used cassette tape, the album opens with 'Tactile breath 2km to Saulter', a faded karimba solo that's woken up by unsettling foley sounds. And on 'Dense crowds under too hot cameras', Cahill begins to complicate things further, layering his guitar lines with dubby echoes and melodica loops until there's just a fog of dense, tape-warped harmony.

Cahill's simpler, more melancholy moments are where it's at, like the ghosted 'You never told me you were a painter' or 'Only one way to hit the threshold', but this is good stuff throughout, bringing back fond memories of New Weird America's mid-'00s CDR era.

Tracklist:
1-1 Family Ravine - Tactile breath 2km to Saulter [3:01]
1-2 Family Ravine - Dense crowds under too hot cameras [6:26]
1-3 Family Ravine - You never told me you were a painter [7:26]
1-4 Family Ravine - Windmills refusing to sync [5:50]
1-5 Family Ravine - Only one way to hit the threshold [6:52]
1-6 Family Ravine - Our vastness shrinks when we're down to the minute [5:56]