B-Side Guys

A centerpiece on their album dedicated to their late bassist Stone Anderson, Silver Fern’s “Holes” transforms personal loss into universal meditation through the lens of natural cycles. The track, from their album “The Great Bright Flash of Light,” watches as carefully tended voids fill themselves back in, finding both solace and sorrow in nature’s persistent renewal.

The production creates a sonic ecosystem where absence and presence dance in delicate balance. Jonathan Shrout’s bass work, carrying on Anderson’s legacy, provides the steady foundation from which the Whaley siblings’ guitars grow and intertwine – one handling slide work while the other builds Fripp and Eno-inspired loops that hover like morning mist over the composition.

The lyrics take on profound resonance in light of the dedication: “All of the holes we dig / fill back up with soil / rain turns dirt to mud / all of the worms recoil.” These images of natural cycles speak to both physical and emotional voids, while the arrangement’s slowcore pacing gives each observation space to sink in before the next wave of sound washes over it. The band’s Huntsville, Alabama origins peek through in the organic quality of the imagery, even as the soundscape reaches toward more ethereal territories.

What elevates “Holes” beyond typical dream pop territory is its ability to maintain emotional directness even through layers of sonic abstraction. When Shannon Whaley observes “I know there’s wind out there / but the trees don’t seem to sway,” the gap between perception and reality becomes a metaphor for grief itself – knowing someone is gone while still feeling their presence in the spaces they left behind.

The track demonstrates how Silver Fern has evolved from their folk beginnings without losing sight of what makes those roots meaningful – the ability to translate profound human experience through natural metaphor, now enhanced by their command of shoegaze dynamics and textural complexity. Like the morning that “will come still / quiet as before,” the song finds beauty in how life persists even as it acknowledges what’s been lost.