Let A Lover Drown You

Andy Baxter and Kyle Jahnke pare their sound to the bare essentials on *Let a Lover Drown You*, with crucial assistance from producer John Paul White of Civil Wars fame. Basing the arrangements around acoustic strumming and carefully crafted vocal harmonies (often accompanied by little or nothing else), Baxter and Jahnke employ adventurous melodies on tunes like the intense “Bed Down” and the tenderhearted “Gold” to create gorgeously fragile art folk. Even when the sound expands with the orchestral atmospheres of “Catalogue” or “Until Tomorrow,” it’s always as subtle as it is swoon-worthy.

Let A Lover Drown You is Penny & Sparrow’s debut release for Single Lock. The Austin-made singer-songwriter duo dwells in the spaces left between contradictions and opposing forces. In fact, it’s where they’re most at home. As the title of their latest album, Let A Lover Drown You, suggests, they know intimately the ideas of using pain as a barometer of passion and giving as a means of gaining. Opposites themselves, vocalist Andy Baxter (lover of books and climate-controlled coffee shops) and composer Kyle Jahnke (seeker of adventure, preferably outdoors), sacrificed most semblances of comfort and certainty in their lives to take their self-released recordings they made after meeting as University of Texas roommates to the next level: full-time, D.I.Y., coast-to-coast touring. Their gorgeous, almost luminescent harmonies paired with cutting, contemplative songs, inspired by a musical grab bag of Simon and Garfunkel, Slim Whitman, The Swell Season, Bon Iver, even Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim, earned the duo a nationwide legion of fans; many bordering on, if not, obsessed.