B-Side Guys

Chris Chism makes the kind of music that asks you to slow down before it asks you to listen. The North Carolina-based songwriter, originally from Indiana, works in the space where folk and indie quietly overlap, playing guitar and banjo with a sensibility shaped by artists like Bon Iver, Townes Van Zandt, and Sufjan Stevens. All Our Time, his four-track EP released in February, moves through a range of emotional temperatures in twelve minutes, from grief to gratitude, from something close to fury to something close to peace. It’s a small collection that hints at a larger musical world still taking shape.

The title track opens things with unhurried patience. “Sure as the rains fell,” Chism sings, “this we all can know for sure, that time will pass on by.” The phrasing is plain and a little strange in the best way, the kind of lyric that sounds unfinished until you realize it knows exactly what it’s doing. Seasons change, windows open, birds disappear till spring. The song builds its meditation on transience from small, concrete observations rather than abstract declarations, and the instrumental passages give the imagery room to settle. By the time Chism reaches “Ivy slowly growing, the space we’ve yet to fill,” the song has earned the quiet it lives in.

“Remembrance” is the EP’s heaviest moment and its most unflinching. “Mother died last night from pills,” Chism sings, without preamble or cushioning, and the directness hits harder than any amount of stylistic ornamentation could. What follows is not a grief song in the conventional sense but something more complicated: an admission of judgment passed too quickly, a father and son dancing in the yard, the whole family carrying on and wondering what she would think of them for it. “I was afraid” arrives three times near the end, each repetition sitting in more silence than the last. It’s a bruising piece of songwriting, and Chism delivers it without self-pity or performance.

“Take Shelter” shifts register entirely, the EP’s loudest and most urgent track. The flood is coming, the thunder crashes, nothing on the ground can be held down, and the instruction to hide away carries equal parts warning and dark acceptance. Where “Remembrance” sits in stillness, this one moves with a kind of fatalistic energy, the dynamics pushing harder than anything else on the record. The contrast between the two songs back to back is one of the EP’s better structural choices, the emotional whiplash feeling intentional rather than scattered.

The closing “Bluebird” brings everything back down to earth in the most literal sense: a moon spotted in flight, songs found without trying, troubles set aside for a little while. Chism spends time with friends, talks through till morning, and finds the peace and quiet he never thought he’d find. The lyric “just as it stopped raining, he died without pain then” is slight and unpolished in a way that suits the song’s mood perfectly, the rough edge part of what makes it feel honest rather than constructed. The final image of hiding carries a different weight than “Take Shelter”‘s hiding away: this time it’s protective rather than resigned, a chosen shelter rather than a forced one.

At twelve minutes, All Our Time doesn’t overstay or oversell. Four songs, four different temperatures, a songwriter moving between a mother’s death and a bluebird spotted through the window without forcing the two things into conversation. Chism has a full-length record in mind for next year, and if this EP is any indication, he’s already doing the harder work of figuring out what he actually has to say before saying it at length.

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