Elijah Batson

Emo country/y'allternative/southern gothic folk - Covington, KY

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Sometime in the winter of 2023, I sat in Elijah Batson’s apartment as he showed me the rough mixes for Wildebeest. I remember first being blown away by the ambitious arrangements, rife with moody horns, cascading keys and punchy guitar riffs. Batson is a prolific and sharp songwriter and a multi-instrumentalist whose chops cut through immediately on their debut record. The opening lines of “Gawkin’ at the Moon” ground the tune firmly in a borderland: “Just off the river / Born flossin’ the teeth of the south and Midwest.” Elijah Batson hails from Latonia, KY, spitting distance from Cincinnati, OH and he seems built to fit in the in-between spaces: country and folk impulses meld freely with emo melodrama all over Wildebeest. This album is a portrait of the in-between places, sonically and lyrically.

Elijah Batson’s debut full length is a glorious crash-out and a testament to survival. Brimful of black-out nights, flipped cars and ambulance lights, Elijah records the violence that small town America inflicts on it’s youth. These stories could sit alongside haggard, trailer park tales of songwriters like Karly Hartzman (of Wednesday) or Jason Isbell. On “Truckstop,” Batson recalls a truck crashing through the front of a house over organ and guitar feedback. In “Career Ending Call,” he recounts a night that scars an EMT for life. But, one would be foolish to reduce this record to a litany of Southern Gothic violence. Elijah is simply willing to look that ugliness in the face and report back to the rest of us.

Across this record, Batson details the struggles of a working class artist, like going to work at a dead-end job before the coffee shops open on “I Hope.” It can be easy to romanticize the life of the starving artist until you have to scrape together a living while trying to have enough energy to make things that you’re proud of. The narrator on that tune eschews nostalgia for the hand-to-mouth living of their twenties. “On a Roll” and “Way Out” detail cycles of self-doubt and self-destruction, and the hope that maybe life won’t always feel this hard.

The title track of the record is a clear-eyed reckoning with all the history that comes with living in the town where you grew up: “I’m stuck trapped underneath my hometown and what that means / Haunted by my history, the shadow of my family tree.” The communal and cosmic live right alongside the personal throughout this record. “Porch Sittin’” is an apt closer, a celebration of community in the here and now and a stunning counterpoint to “Wildebeest.” We can’t choose where we’re from, but we can choose where we’re going. “Could be a punk house, a farm house or a quiet neighborhood, but when St. Peter comes calling, just tell him to join us on the porch.”

- Jacob Perez