BY PAUL CASTLES
“I wake up in the morning and I feel I need to buy canned goods, I think we’re officially under authoritarian rule,” says Chokecherry vocalist E Scarlett Levinson. “It’s scary, but I know there’s more of us than them and that our strength lies in our numbers.”
Fortunately for Scarlett and co-singer Izzie Clark, they have a glorious debut album in ‘Ripe Fruit Rots and Falls’ to at least briefly distract them from the nation’s present scarily toxic state.
Stunning single releases ‘Goldmine’ and ‘Secrets’ have heightened excitement for the rest of their debut full-length, the former song a spine-tingling bewitching salute to Scottish 80s ethereal maestros, the Cocteau Twins.
“Oh, the Cocteau Twins are such a huge inspiration to both of us,” says Scarlett. “I loved Jeff Buckley when I was younger. There’s a demo of him and Liz Fraser together singing ‘All Flowers in Time Bend Towards the Sun’. I always felt guilty loving that song as she said she didn’t want it released, but that’s how I first found the Cocteau Twins.”
The Cocteau Twins were melancholic maestros, but Chokecherry can flick the feel-good switch when right to do so and ‘Secrets’ is a glorious hallelujah to San Francisco and all that goes with it.
“That video was such fun to make,” recalls Scarlett. “It was really beautiful, and we felt like we were on ecstasy all day, just running alongside the railway tracks. It was intended as almost like a homage to our home city, the birthplace of the band and the only downside was that I got quite sunburnt on the day!”
The duo worked with three producers on the album, each bringing something to the Chokecherry turntable.
“Half the album was recorded in the same studio where we recorded our first two singles,” says Izzie. “So, it was nice to come back to where the band started, the places that inspired us and reconnect. We got to record two songs with Chris Coady who is such a smart and cool guy, he’s a genius!”
Both Izzie and Scarlett also took particular pleasure in working with two members of DIIV, having caught the band live in California.
“We went to a DIIV show when we were recording the song ‘February’ with Zac Tuch,” says Izzie. “He said let’s drive to the Majestic Ventura Theater to see DIIV, which just happens to be where I had my prom, and we just saw this incredible show. The whole thing was so inspiring, the way the band spoke about how they feel politically, it was all just very poignant.
“We found out DIIV also worked with Chris Coady and he introduced us to the band and so we ended up having two members of DIIV play with us on our album which has not even sunk in yet,” adds Izzie. “The very people who inspired us are now immortalized on our record!”
Another band Chokecherry are keen to namecheck are Destroy Boys who took them out on tour earlier in the year. “We learnt such a lot from them,” says Scarlett. “It was a full US and Canada tour, and we’ve never done anything on that scale before. The whole experience was just really cool, visiting so many places for the first time.”
“Destroy Boys are just so great at lifting the people around them,” adds Izzie, “just super cool. They use their platform for good all the time. At every show they brought on a local mutual aid group to speak before their set, and let them have a table by the merch desk. It was so empowering to have a direct way to combine a show with protest.”
Chokecherry pack a lot into the album, and throughout they lay down warm irresistible vocal harmonies that energize each track, which themselves turn the spotlight on protest, power and poignancy with almost equal focus.
“As most art often is, the album is a reflection of where we’re at right now,” says Izzie. “There’s a lot of heartbreak on this record with an outpouring of grief around relationships and state of the world in general.
“We go through a lot of processes on this album,” she adds. “This has been a crazy hard year for us both, so I honestly don’t know what we’d have done without this album. This record has certainly helped us process those emotions,” adds Izzie. “Music is powerful, man.”
