REVIEW: The Color Forty Nine — String Ladders (LP)

We’re living in a culture of self-awareness, and it’s evident pretty much everywhere you look in cinema, literature, and music the same. Addressing it is commonplace; making it understandable and even relatable is something entirely different, but this didn’t stop The Color Forty Nine from putting their best effort forward in their album String Ladders. Rather than making the stereotypically introspective folk album with String Ladders, the California-based act saw fit to explore the depth of their composing abilities and really see how deep into the netherworlds of alternative songcraft they could venture without losing their collective identity.

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From what I can tell, the results are far and away grander than what most would expect out of as wicked an experiment; “String Ladder” is a bold fusion of gothic folk and acoustic desert rock, “Fly On” speaks to the Tom Waitsian eclecticisms of every unfinished harmony in their first LP, while “Battling Down” is the thought-provoking commentary on hipster-style singer/songwriters I didn’t know I needed to hear this summer. For all intents and purposes, String Ladders feels like the perfect indie folk record, weighs as much as Blues for the Red Sun, and stings with the emotionality of a Nick Cave LP. The sum of its strangeness? A watershed moment for The Color Forty Nine.

“Another World” combines the dark sensibilities of post-punk with a wistful folk/rock I don’t see a lot of in the underground or mainstream the same anymore, but placed beside the Dax Riggs basement tape “I’m Going to Try,” it doesn’t even begin to pimp the versatility this act is working with in 2021. I love how beautifully the vocal overwhelms the strings in “What Would I Know” and “Hold My Hand,” even though the instrumentation in the latter of these two songs is much statelier than anything else on the record.

String Ladders could essentially be broken into two aesthetical halves, but I like that The Color Forty Nine decided to release it as a complete LP rather than as individual extended plays for one reason; they aren’t running from the duality in their sound. Embracing the odd and rejecting the predictable is the name of the game here, as would be the case in any unforgettable pop offering.

Let me make this clear — I don’t think String Ladders is a lighthearted listen that most folk fans are going to look at with excessive adulation. However, the dark corner of the folk/rock lexicon this album sources its chills-factor from makes for every song included in this tracklist sounding epically well written. I was astounded at the amount of passion sewn into the simplistic framework of String Ladders, and though

The Color Forty Nine’s hype has mostly been restricted to the southern California scene that gave them their start, and I can see that changing exponentially with the success of this disc on college radio. A lot is being said of the indie movements out of Denver and Austin this summer, but San Diego belongs in the conversation because of bands like this one.

Colin Jordan