Moving forward, looking back

Lauren Wittmann’s apartment was bright and trinket-filled, and Emily Sinclair felt nostalgia for it as soon as she walked through the door.

It was 2018 or so, and as Sinclair, the lead vocalist for Winnipeg indie quartet Virgo Rising, tells it, crossing the transom and kicking off her shoes into a pile of strange soles felt like “bursting into the world” for the very first time.

“I was finally meeting my people,” Sinclair recalls.

A few years later, that same unit came up for rent, and Sinclair moved in, unboxing her possessions and hanging her frames on the hammered nails of prior tenants.

The natural light came through the windows just as it had when she’d first arrived, but Sinclair soon reached a familiar conclusion: time on earth is a rental; the clock ticks forward unless it’s broken.

“You know, I just turned 25, and I’m constantly chasing this version of my life that existed so long ago in these places,” says Sinclair, who plays in Virgo Rising with Isaac Tate and the sibling duo of Jenna and Lauren Wittmann. “I moved back into the same apartment Lauren lived in to chase the feelings and nostalgia and experiences that I once had, but I realized you can never go back to the way that it was, that nothing will ever be the same again.”

Those feelings of longing for the recent past with the maturity of a changed spirit — knowing that we deserve space to make new memories — are among the driving forces for Wishbone, the debut LP from Virgo Rising, released independently today.

“It’s about sitting with what is and being grateful and privileged to live the life you’re living at the moment, honouring the experiences that have made you while understanding that not everything feels romantic as you experience it,” Sinclair says.

Wishbone’s 10 tracks represent a turned corner for Virgo Rising, which has been making music since 2018 and has released a pair of well-received EPs — 2021’s Sixteenth Sapphire and 2023’s Vampyre Year — via Winnipeg’s House of Wonders label.

The band self-produced Wishbone, resulting in a personal, well-rounded collection, centred on a series of tracks which encapsulate the impermanent permanence of coming of age. Wishbone is the “something” that’s hyphenated after 20.

“Self-producing let us think about the whole process in a new way, the planning and the order we do things, understanding how much time it takes,” says Lauren Wittmann, a zine-maker and artist who co-owns the popular Little Italy shop Riley Grae. “We were able to control every single part, and with all of us being perfectionists, that was a turning point. I was like, ‘Oh, we really actually do get to have our hands on every part of the whole process,’ which was exciting for us.”

Engineered at No Fun Club and mixed with Lino D’Ottavio at Basement Studios, Wishbone is a masterclass in indie-rock efficiency, with Virgo Rising’s collective approach to songwriting ensuring that listeners on every frequency will find their sound.

Vulnerability is a word that will come to mind; Virgo Rising sings of bruised skin and skinned knees, with “blood” dotting the album’s lyric sheet. “For years I’ve been trying / to hide / stuck onto me I feel it when I bleed,” Sinclair sings on Bug on Me.

And as the title track draws on Sinclair’s memories of her almost-shared apartment, the serpentine Virginia Creeper is another cut defined by a relinquished address that’s fixed in amber.

The penultimate track was penned by Lauren Wittmann about her late oppa, who would sit in his sunbeam and read his morning paper, surrounded by “the worst-ever” wood panelling and bordered by a lush backyard garden featuring the titular flora.

“That song was hard to explain to the band,” says Wittmann. “The best I could do was to say I wanted it to sound like when the meteor hit the dinosaurs, but also one of those cars that’s modded so the bass speakers cause the air to move.”

Less prehistoric, but no less grief-stricken, is the record’s shortest track, Eleanor Please, which begins with a wakeup plea and transforms to give voice to imperilled alarm.

Outside her childhood home, Sinclair took a shine to a pair of baby rabbits, naming them Elliott and Eleanor, carrying them around the yard and giving them treats from the garden as nourishment. When a massive hawk swooped down, Sinclair’s backyard buddies shrieked.

“It was such a shock to see something so grotesque in nature, just outside my window,” says Sinclair. “I also felt a profound sense of guilt for coddling these wild animals. Maybe I made them too docile, and maybe I shouldn’t have touched them, just left them alone and they would still be alive,” she says. “The shortness of the song is the shortness of those little babies’ lives.”

“Have you ever heard a rabbit scream?” Lauren Wittmann asks. “It’s like a baby mixed with a monster.”

“It’s a horrifying, disturbing sound made by something so small. It is nature, but it still really depresses me that’s what happened to this tiny defenceless baby trying to get from one side of the yard to the other,” Sinclair says.

Independence is freeing, but terrifying, and Virgo Rising — set to embark on an Eastern Canada tour this fall — is jumping in feet first.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com

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