For songwriter Leah Lavigne, Ok Cowgirl began as a mantra. As a solo artist, she was beginning to feel stuck – the keyboard on which she was classically trained had grown stale, and the songs she was writing on it only managed to capture a sliver of her emotional range. Writing and performing music had once been a life-changing force of connection – a way to find common ground as an Asian-American growing up in predominantly white environments, a means to speak about her inner world and actually be heard. But after attending school and finding community in New York City, her expanded musical purview and deepened understanding of self made for more energy than could fit within the fences of playing songs alone behind a piano. The land of the known wasn’t cutting it – she needed a frontier. So: Lavigne borrows a guitar, Lavigne starts a rock band. So goes the command: giddy-up!
Couldn’t Save Us From My Gut, Ok Cowgirl’s debut LP, carries in it a curlicue thread of that wild western ethos – a dare to establish your own law, to venture beyond the world of agreed-upon norms of right and wrong. Enter the country classic: wide open spaces, room to make a big mistake. Existing in that freedom is an attitude Lavigne aspires to as much as she struggles with – by her own admission, it’s the “extreme opposite” of the way she’s been conditioned. Each of the album’s ten tracks finds Lavigne and her Brooklyn indie rock quintet wrangling self-empowerment in a variety of contexts – romantic love, societal obligation, how merciless a day in America can be – and working to parse their own truth from a tangle of inherited noise. But the record’s title is something of an admission of success – Ok Cowgirl have started living by their own code, and they’re not likely to quit.
Since forming the project in 2018, Lavigne gradually culled the band (rounded out by lead guitarist Jake Sabinsky, guitar and synth player John Miller, bassist Ryan Work, and drummer Matt Birkenholz) from her Brooklyn surroundings – college dormmates, local bartenders, and the producer of the project’s inaugural releases all make appearances in the lineup. After taking advantage of the torrent of post-lockdown energy coming out of New York’s indie circles and becoming an all-terrain, stage-tested outfit in the process, the band sought a key collaborator in Alex Farrar, the visionary Asheville producer responsible for a staggering percentage of releases in indie rock’s modern pantheon. The pairing proves ideal on Couldn’t Save Us From My Gut, as Farrar’s penchant for making bands sound cataclysmically massive meets a series of performances worthy of association alongside his work with Wednesday or Indigo de Souza. The confidence the band exudes is thrilling – the six years they’d spent preparing for their debut are on vivid display.
Much of Ok Cowgirl’s confidence is made apparent in how Lavigne and her bandmates consistently bend each arrangement to serve the conversations at their center. “The holiest thing is a feeling,” Lavigne tells me, and the sanctity of her band’s approach is clear – each song takes the shape of a prism for her commune with herself. “Forever” experiments with removing the constraint of finite life from a relationship, and yields an exciting fourth-wall break: “I’ve been trying to figure out why I hate this song / maybe I just hate the fact I had these thoughts.” “Our Love” answers by resolving to buck the traditional impulse to measure a relationship’s worth by its duration, sagely suggesting its gift could be to better prepare us for what follows: “Sometimes the love just fills you up / so you buoy to the top / and you start to float away.” Lavigne renders these complexities into performances with dramatic gravitas, and her band is the perfect scene partner – deftly leaving space for the startling range of her vocal capability in one moment, brilliantly countering her melodies in others. Under Farrar’s guidance, Ok Cowgirl allowed themselves to stretch out across the vast territory afforded them as a collaborative unit, winning miles of new ground along the way: reverb is transformed from a crutch into a tool, and the aims of being simply beautiful are exchanged for harnessing the raw potency – “having ass,” as the band calls it – generated after a long tenure honing themselves as a live act.
And ass they have – much of Couldn’t Save Us From My Gut sees Ok Cowgirl unleashing their dynamism in unexpected directions. In simpler terms, they rip – see live favorite “Larry David” for a furious exhaust vent on a record filled with pent-up ambivalence. Its “everything is fucked” gang vocal and perfect stomping tempo provide an easy alignment with the listener’s own sense of tension and release – a result arrived at by an afternoon of rehearsal room spontaneity. Elsewhere, a sudden reference to a Midwestern landmark in “Mars Cheese Castle” allows a smile to break across the surface of a song otherwise textured by grief. These surprises – where Lavigne and band unleash the subliminal, allowing a dynamic, profound messiness to tear free – often make for the record’s most captivating moments, such as the electrifying drop-out in lead single “Little Splinters”: “Sometimes vulnerability just looks like trash,” Lavigne rasps. “Shared it just to scare myself and then to have to let it go.”
“Sometimes I feel like I write the songs before I’m ready for them, almost,” she tells me. This reads as a good sign – Lavigne started Ok Cowgirl to make room for a stifled intuition, a sense of direction she often strayed from out of fear. Now that intuition is getting out ahead of her, leading her into worlds unknown. In cowgirl keeping, one could almost say she’s riding it into the sunset.
—- Caleb Cordes
