MORE EAZE - Sentence Structure In The Country

Looking at the cover of "Sentence Structure In The Country", the new album by Mari Maurice Rubio, aka More Eaze, it's hard not to be captivated by the evocative power of Daniel Castrejón's painting. The two girls, sitting with their heads bowed and surrounded by octopuses that look equally depressed, hint at affliction toward a present being stripped bare by a technology racing forward at hypersonic speed.

The Brooklyn-based composer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist once again turns to electroacoustic compositions, developed sometimes with delicacy and elsewhere with dismay, drawing on folk-inflected instrumentation and vaguely pop touches that at times heighten the melodic payoff.
The title, meanwhile, points to what Mari herself has described as "an acknowledgment of the language that has shaped music production", because, after all, as Coltrane once said, "everything has to do with this".
Joined on some tracks by Wendy Eisenberg on electric guitar, piano and vocals, Henry Earnest on second electric guitar, Alice Gerlach on cello, Jade Guterman on acoustic guitar and Ryan Sawyer on drums, the American musician explains how each contributor shaped the record differently: "There are ways Jade or Wendy choose to play the chords that aren't how I would play them in this context, but that's exactly the point. Their voices redefine what I'm creating, but they also help me define my own style".

And indeed Sawyer's drum parts also play an equally distinctive role on the album, entering gingerly and at times with a free-jazz feel on tracks like "Distance" or the more elusive "Biters".
Improvisation halfway between experimental folk and ambient is likewise the pivot of the barely six minutes of "Crunch The Numbers", with melodic beds unfurling at every shift in atmosphere, between acoustic flashes and post-rock isolationism, while Earnest's guitar collides here and there with Eaze's prepared parts, seemingly scattered at random.
"The Producer", on the other hand, is the not entirely convincing attempt to venture into electro-pop territory via a rather gloomy ballad, which somehow opens up in its second half. "Healing Attempt" likewise tries once more to break away from the free-form electroacoustic approach, though with a more playful bent.

Rubio's reflections also take in personal matters, shedding light on the path she's taken: "It's hard to come to terms with major changes in the moment, so it takes a lot of reflection and processing after the fact. I couldn't detach myself from what my material was trying to tell me. Experimenting with these different combinations helped me figure out what the core elements were, and that's how the songs took on a life of their own. It's like a vicious circle: the more you keep performing them, the more you set a precedent for what the song could become".
In this hall of mirrors of absurd contrasts, the title track, in its sheer electro-folk madness, ultimately turns out to be the high point of an album that succeeds most in its paradoxically most elusive moments, and least in those that are partly, deliberately, more "finished".

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27/04/2026