Back in 2023, bassist Peter Kerlin (Sunwatchers, Chris Forsyth Solar Motel Band, Bent Arcana, Everloving) and drummer Rob Smith (Gray/Smith, Rhyton, Pigeons) ritualistically burnt their passports, ate the ashes, and began conspiring together under the guise of Animal, Surrender!

Kerlin's spidery and melodious 8-string electric bass pushes the expected language of that instrument into terrain more often inhabited by lutes or pianos, and begs to interweave with a drummer like Smith who slyly punctuates, hisses, and propels against the grain. The duo's often wordless music is spun from threads of lost folksongs and polyrhythms into hypnotic, latticework compositions whose melodies and beats shift like cat's-cradles strung between their constantly moving hands.

Their eponymous debut on Ernest Jennings Record Co. in 2024 found haunting covers of Nick Drake and Mike Wexler lurking amongst a tangle of lean, progressive originals, all crafted with the terse economy of post-rock, but reflecting a kaleidoscopic, pastoral vision in its eyes.

Their forthcoming album, A Boot for Every Bane (2025 EJRC), builds upon the incantatory language of the first while inviting the talents and mercurial instincts of pipe organist Curt Sydnor (Greg Saunier, Yonatan Gat, Peni Candra Rini) into the magick circle.

From within historic St. John's Church in Richmond, Virginia, where Poe's mother sleeps eternal and Patrick Henry once challenged the young nation to give him liberty or give him death, Sydnor breathes charged air from 120 year-old pipes to help the group coax troubled spirits from the American dirt for a spiritual reckoning.

With new songs like Misswanderer and Ruinous Realm, Kerlin's mesmerizing bass-lines lure us further down the group's sonic left-hand path into thickets of compound rhythm and organ swells, where the trio also resurrects and rewilds two old familiar American standards: the seductive and sub-tropical Poinciana made famous by Ahmad Jamal's trio, and the untraceable, frontier river-song Shenandoah, known from deep renditions by Belafonte, Dylan, and Tony Rice to name but a few.

Yet when an animal catches its own distorted reflection in the rolling river, what is left to do but surrender to the song?