I love sad stuff. Sad movies, sad songs, sad first-person essays about people’s dogs dying. Sadness is the biggest emotion, and forcing it on myself makes me feel alive and wholly human. If you’re also unrepentantly mopey, boy do I have an album for you.
Everything I Love Has Fallen from Me by Catch Prichard (led by Sawyer Gebauer) is 33 minutes of cathartic melancholy. Sawyer Gebauer, the band’s founder and sole songwriter, has always kinda been like this: While Catch Prichard’s previous albums were more acoustic, countrified affairs, there’s always been a vein of gloom running through them. But there’s no steel guitar here. Everything I Love plays more with electronic tones, exploring synthesized sound as a vessel for this persistent ennui.
It’s a lot like Perfume Genius’ 2020 album Set My Heart on Fire Immediately, but somehow even more morose. (I also can’t help drawing a connection between the deep sadness of this album and the fact that, before moving to Oakland, Gebauer lived in Sweden. While the Swedes write some of the catchiest pop tunes around, the sun does set at like 2:30pm this time of year. So maybe he carried some of that darkness home with him.)
No matter your outlook on life, Everything I Love is an album to curl up with in the coming dark and dreary days.
