On her Northern Spy debut album, Another View, Kalia Vandever’s quartet leans into a taut, clear-eyed study of cycles and grooves with elegiac melodies that effloresce into something dynamic, nearly bursting with life. Vandever’s trombone leads, meeting Mary Halvorson’s elastic guitar lines in shifting light. Kanoa Mendenhall (bass) and Kayvon Gordon (drums) give the music its frame, letting repetition breathe in a mutable structure. Underneath is a narrative about idealization curdling into dread, the way the drafts and shadows of a “dream house” reveal themselves once you move inside. Vandever has drawn, in part, from Carmen Maria Machado’s inventive memoir In the Dream House (Graywolf Press, 2019).

Another View carries forward the patient, long-tone lyricism and quiet insistence that made Regrowth (New Amsterdam, 2022) special. Vandever reveals explorations of space, vulnerability, and dream-logic on We Fell In Turn (AKP, 2023). Here, those qualities mature into a dialogue with her band, inviting discussion of past ideas of intimacy and imagination.
“Staring At The Cracked Window” opens with an improvised prelude from Halvorson before the quartet locks into a groove. A prologue of resilience: someone trapped in a web of suffering beginning to notice the fissures beneath the surface. “Cycle In Mourning” charts the nonlinearity of grief with dense harmony and collective improvisation.

In the context of her solo work and the songcraft she’s honed in collaborative projects like tilt (Vandever’s trio with Isabel Crespo Pardo and Carmen Quill), Vandever’s Another View feels like a multilayered dream. The repetition and shifting motifs are songlike, melancholic, hopeful, volatile. Each listen is another angle, another room, another view.