Enumclaw – Save the Baby [Butterbean Vinyl]– New LP

“I wanna wake up brand new” Enumclaw lead-singer/guitarist Aramis Johnson sings to begin Save the Baby, their debut full-length, out via Luminelle Recordings. The album is a swing for greatness; a collection of life-affirming and deeply personal songs about the importance of chasing after your dreams.  Enter Tacoma, WA’s Enumclaw, whose early singles “Fast N All” and “Free Drop Billy” conjured a swirl of breathless praise from fans and choice publications like Pitchfork and The Fader before striking a single note in front of a live crowd. Even though they hail from the home of grunge, their influences stretch a bit further. Aramis says the band led by the Gallagher brothers is a clear inspiration, given their rise from a working-class background, and not just because his own brother is in the group as well.

 

Enumclaw came from a modest and sometimes harrowing upbringing in Seattle’s sister city, Tacoma. Aramis describes Tacoma as an inescapable component of the band’s identity. “I honestly thought I was going to move to New York last April,” he says. “I was gonna take a break from doing music stuff, to live in a big city and try becoming a photographer. But the band ended up keeping me here in Tacoma.”  His father passed away from sickle cell anemia when he was just 10-years-old, his mother walked for miles to a job at Subway, and his family subsisted on food provided by EBT cards. His best friend when he was younger was diagnosed with schizophrenia. “I feel like if I were the one who had gotten sick, he would have handled it better than I did,” he says, the aforementioned survivor’s guilt heavy in his voice.

Those personal experiences heavily color Save the Baby, titled for the dreams he’s preserved since he was a young child to make a mark on the world. It’s an album about the importance of following your dreams, in spite of relationships going sour and the pressure that comes with being a young Black man who grew up with a fair share of hardships, and about the importance of following your dreams. On the second verse of “Park Lodge,” Aramis sings about the survivor’s remorse of a friend’s mental health deteriorating. “It’s about the feeling of being stuck in Tacoma,” he says. “Just like a lot of people in the Black community feel like they have to make it out through sports or rapping, I have to make it out with the band. I feel like this is our and the band’s only option to do something in a real way with our lives.”