Midland Vibes

Lawrence Rothman Here Lies Love/Sawdust To Stardust

Tracks: The Meaning, A Word's A Weapon, Karmakaze (ft. Amanda Shires), Stable, Deep Cut, A Fire Test (ft. Sarah Klang), Here Lies Love, Demons (ft. Delaney Ramsdell), Worn Out Woman, Slow Rush, Nothing Like Shakespeare, Lost In Her Rock 'N Roll, Sawdust To Stardust

Label:KRO Records

Lawrence Rothman has always made music that feels as though it has been pulled from somewhere private and left briefly exposed to the light. Their songs have never been content to merely describe a life; they seem to inhabit its bruises, its shadows, and its half-healed places. On Here Lies Love / Sawdust to Stardust, that intimacy feels heightened. Rothman has always been deeply personal, but here the veil seems thinner than ever, as though the distance between memory and melody has almost disappeared.

There is something nocturnal about the album. Even when the music opens into the wide horizons of Americana, there are clouds gathering at the edges. Country, folk and rock mingle with more elusive textures, but nothing feels neatly contained. The songs drift, shimmer and bruise, carrying the weight of things remembered and things that perhaps cannot be forgotten. Rothman draws from the language of Americana without becoming bound by it, turning its familiar roads and landscapes into something stranger and more inward.

The record's emotional terrain is vast: addiction and recovery, grief and desire, anxiety, identity, lost love and the stubborn, sometimes exhausting miracle of continuing. Yet these are never presented as signposts on a thematic map. They feel more like ghosts moving through the rooms of the album, appearing at the edges of songs before slipping back into the darkness.

Karmakaze, featuring Amanda Shires, is a particularly beautiful example of this alchemy. It is beauty with its teeth still showing — brooding, bruised and quietly magnetic. Shires' contribution seems to deepen the song's shadows rather than dispel them, creating a strange and gorgeous tension between tenderness and threat. The track feels suspended in that fleeting hour before dawn when everything is quiet enough for old wounds to speak. It is haunting without resorting to theatrics, allowing its sadness to gather slowly until it becomes almost physical.

But The Meaning is where the album's light seems to break through most clearly. Wistful, delicate and quietly devastating, it possesses the rare quality of making longing feel almost tangible. There is no need for grand gestures. The song simply lingers, allowing its melancholy to gather in the spaces between the notes. It feels like looking back through a rain-streaked window at something that has already disappeared — beautiful precisely because it cannot be recovered.

Throughout Here Lies Love / Sawdust to Stardust, Rothman seems to be searching for some kind of shape within the wreckage. The album does not offer easy redemption, nor does it attempt to tidy its darker corners. Instead, it understands survival as something messier and more mysterious: the daily act of gathering yourself from the floor and deciding, somehow, to keep moving.

That is ultimately what makes the record so affecting. Rothman's vulnerability never feels performed. It is woven into the grain of the songs, into their silences as much as their words. The result is an album that feels less like an account of what happened than a dream remembered imperfectly — fragments of love, grief, fear and hope glowing in the dark.

Here Lies Love / Sawdust to Stardust is intimate without being small, sorrowful without surrendering to despair. It sounds like someone standing at the edge of their own history, looking back at the fire and wondering what can still be carried forward. Rothman has always made deeply personal music. Here, they make something even more revealing: music that feels as though it has nowhere left to hide.