Creekbed Carter Hogan delivers a helluva punch on their self-titled album. Creekbed Carter takes a deep dive into negotiating Carter’s Catholic upbringing with their gender expansive identity — along with the navigating trauma and healing. No big deal. At least, Carter makes it all seem effortless with their sweetly -sung and expertly-crafted folk music. You won’t even feel the tip of the knife until it’s lodged between your ribs.
Hogan comes out swinging with “Apiary,” a shimmery folk song that compares the narrator and those in relation to them to beehives of self-hatred and leaking oil pipelines: the beneficiaries of a culture that teaches us to hate ourselves and our queerness.
This emotion is reconciled on songs like “Sycamore,” which airily contrast adhering to the gender binary to taking one’s true shape — and loving oneself all the more for it. While Hogan dives deep into pain and longing for a loved one throughout the EP, it’s clear that this self-assurance can never be taken away. No matter what, they have, they are “closer now than I’ll ever be/to the shape and the form of eternity.”
That act of transformation is a theme that continues through the inventive “Lord, Make Me a Scorpion.” Becoming someone — or something else, is not so much an act of escapism as it is a means of exploration, as well as a way to become attuned with the rest of the world.
By the time Hogan deposits us on dry land with “The Relic Song,” we are all transformed anew. Now, Hogan confronts the Catholic Church’s greed, whose thirst for riches laid the foundations for settler colonialism and capitalism. (Don’t miss the music video, which we posted last week.) Now, instead of self-hatred, Hogan has directed that feeling to where it belongs.
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