Until They Burn Me Follow the Bad Omens on COVEN

Unrequited love is the first thing to draw Until They Burn Me toward witchcraft on COVEN. In Charlotte and the Witch, wanting someone badly enough brings a dangerous kind of help into view. That opening gives the six-song EP its stakes: the supernatural has a hold on people because it offers them something they already want. Across the record, the band follows that impulse through dark country, blues, folk and rock, giving each tale its own musical shape.

There’s a long partnership behind those shifts. Cody Carlyle and Travis Jordan first made music together in The Dry Season, and their collaboration stretches back more than 35 years. As Until They Burn Me, the two songwriters, singers and multi-instrumentalists work between home studios in Ferndale, Washington, and Cincinnati, Ohio. They made this EP with longtime collaborator Travis Martin. The record gives their way of writing across that distance a shared preoccupation, with room for each song to decide how close it wants to get to the dark.

Blackbird gives the sequence a turn toward blues. An omen opens a gap between an ordinary encounter with nature and the warning someone wants, or fears, to find there. The instrumental Bedbugs then takes the voice out of the conversation. At just over a minute, it leaves the unease to the music. Set against the stories around it, that brief pause shows how much the EP can suggest without saying exactly what’s wrong.

The second half keeps changing scale. Leechcraft and the brief Long Meg lead into Sister Midnight, which runs more than six minutes. The difference in length gives the collection an uneven rhythm well suited to folklore: some tales pass quickly from one person to the next; others take their time before they let you go. The EP sits alongside Mud Music and A Carnival of Reveries in a catalogue with room for different musical forms. Its coherence comes from the way the songs return to the same unease across different settings.

Witchcraft on COVEN is an impulse as much as a subject. It’s there in the wish to change another person’s mind, the temptation to treat a bird as a sign, and the instinct to give a shape to a fear we can’t explain. Carlyle, Jordan and Martin leave those impulses close to the surface. The songs have room to disagree about where the danger comes from, which is what allows the individual tales to stay strange.