I’ve spent the last few years telling friends about Lily Seabird’s music and always end up looking a bit foolish. Anytime I think I have the young Vermont artist pegged, she releases a new batch of songs that blows my prior conceptions of her music to smithereens. So, for my own ego’s sake, let’s skip the indie rock and singer-songwriter labels this time. Seabird’s third full-length, Lightspheres On Their Way, defies simple categorization. It’s the kind of record that breathes and moves to a rhythm all its own. It adopts a unique mythology (the idea of “lightspheres”), allows its songs to pick their own pain, and wonders and reckons in its own language and time about the deeply personal in a way that feels strikingly universal. A warm, humming harmonium blows through opener “The Pulley,” soft-strummed guitars and Seabird’s searching voice are all that tether the skies to the ground. “Am I still allowed to pray / Even if I don’t believe anymore?” she asks on high. It’s the type of wonder that makes us poke at the stars as children; as adults, the questions have a way of following us back down to earth. Seabird’s emotions run the gamut from fear and awe to disappointment and frustration as she seeks answers for how we’re expected to endure all the difficult circumstances she sings about across Lightspheres. When the heavens remain mum to Seabird’s earnest inquiries, the harmonium and guitars linger before finally making their departure, the reality setting in that there might be as much illumination gained from looking within as above. It’s in the spilling, tumbling words of the Steinbeckian “Bindlestiff” where listeners might first realize that Seabird isn’t just crafting songs around particular feelings so much as the feelings themselves are the molds that shape the songs. On grungy lead single “Election Day,” her moshing wails on the last word of each verse give every emotion physicality. It’s the rhythmic, moody spaces loitering about “Blackstar” that devastate just as much as a brutal line like “And I don’t wanna be someone if you’re not here with me.” Lightspheres comes across as both patient and urgent in that way. On “Afterglow,” the debris of trash cans and scattered photographs almost come dancing to life alongside buoyant cello and trumpet parts as Seabird skips off in a trail of “La-da-das.” It’s these subtle flourishes that often set her songs off on unexpected and beautiful trajectories. “Pennsy” hitches a ride on the PA turnpike back home to Bucks County, where the “big, beautiful lie” (perhaps addiction) slowly ravages a family in denial. It’s the type of story about the type of people who rarely get noticed, let alone helped. Seabird reports back with unflinching candor as cello and ebow guitar flesh out the song’s ominous, acoustic strumming. The lumbering “Portal to the Past” broods over the remnants of a love lost to time, Seabird’s voice emotionally sifting through the ashes as it shifts from hushed and gritty to cracking and wailing. Similarly, “Slipswitch” finds Seabird adopting her comfortable twang as she looks back at the moments and memories that led to a broken relationship. “And it was painful, and it was ugly,” she admits. “But at the root of it all it was love burning.” There’s not much blame in these songs—more an acceptance that this is just how things turned out. Seabird’s characters do find some comfort, however, in the fact that these relationships, even if failed, always began out of genuine love. Seabird has described a “lightsphere” as anything that “shifts stories, feelings, and trajectories.” By the closing title track, it’s hard not to hear the album itself as one. Seabird’s protagonist returns to Pennsylvania once more, the home she’s told us has “always sown the seeds of my heart’s greatest pain.” She wonders how she’ll move on when her mother, clearly a contentious figure in her life, finally passes away, but soon realizes it won’t be as simple as she thinks. Drums and guitars that we didn’t even know were in the room suddenly explode to life in the type of thunderous response we might’ve expected from the heavens in “The Pulley.” “I’ll see her in the morning, and I’ll see her in the night,” Seabird belts. “Standing on that hill / Dancing in the night […] Tell her I’ll be alright!” It’s a raw, beautiful moment of forgiveness—a self-actualization the entire album has been quietly working toward. Maybe that’s the best compliment I can give Lightspheres On Their Way: Seabird has made a lightsphere of her own, in dark times when we need it most. [Lame-O]