TRAILS AND WAYS :: "Tereza"

A modern day Rousseau would probably reflect on our current age with, "Music is born free and yet everywhere it is in chains." Bassist and vocalist Emma Oppen sheepishly coos her response, "It was just just my nature," in the chorus of TRAILS AND WAYS' fine first single, "Tereza," seemingly liberating herself and everyone else. An awesome "shrug" of a lyric, a sort of implicit helplessness or explicit freedom, Oppen and her bandmates from Oakland seem beholden only to themselves as dreamy soundscapes ebb and flow in time with oblique lyrics like, "I made myself a shoreline without water." The genre references footnote Radio Dept. and School Of Seven Bells (with either the treble or the opiates turned way up) though the over-arching sentiment is a sort of Je ne sais quoi, an arrangement with a friction coefficient of zero, gliding from shore to shore under a force, contract and authority all its own. Oppen suggests this freedom is hard-wired, and its hard to argue as the song, quite literally, washes away in the final seconds.