with Molly Parden
The word extraordinary is defined as something beyond, amazing, or incredible. The word extralife doesnt exist. But in the world of Darlingsideanother previously non-existent wordits all about invention, expansion, and elevating everything into the realm of the extraordinary both conceptually and through musical performance. The bands new album Extralife intensifies the journey begun on its critically acclaimed 2015 album Birds Say. On that project, Darlingsides quartet of bassist Dave Senft, guitarist/banjoist Don Mitchell, violinist/mandolinist Auyon Mukharji, and cellist/guitarist Harris Paseltiner fused assertions (Go Back), assumptions (God Of Loss), predictions (The Ancestor), projections (Do You Ever Live?) and reflections (White Horses). We put our four heads together and created this collective consciousness about bits and pieces from our past and how we saw the world based upon reminiscences, explains Paseltiner about that sojourn. It having been the Massachusetts groups second full-length outing, Birds Say mastered a musical and lyrical path that led to the more challenging territory explored on Extralife. Mukharji describes the Extralife concept as a life beyond where we are now, whether that's a brand new thing, a rebirth, or just a new version of ourselves as we move forward. So by abandoning Birds Says nostalgia and its tales of what once was, Darlingside created its polar opposite with Extralife, the new album exploring what is now and what might be simultaneously in the brave new world.A lot of the album has to do with the present and the future, Mukharji reveals, that future being a completely unknown quantity and the present being a new and bizarre place to be living in. I think were grappling with a number of aspects of reality we had not expected. That reality, surviving a dystopian landscape, constructs the new album, the band killing many of its prior darlings (the name Darlingside being a reference to non-attachment)