Shabason & Krgovich: Four Days in June LP

Since their 2020 collaborative album, Philadelphia, Joseph Shabason and Nicholas Krgovich have been locked in a musical orbit that centrifugally extracts beauty and grandeur from the lesser details of their daily lives. Across their joint discography, they’ve created a small universe where wry and melancholy micro-moments quietly bloom into full-scale wonders of the heart. But where the pair’s previous mutual efforts showed them peering at pop songs from tidepools of mutated adult contemporary and first-thought-best-thought poetics, Four Days in June snapshots an unself-conscious reach toward the kind of CD era songcraft that lives in your car’s center console, always ready to be thrown on while life happens. It spiritually grafts its scope from heyday all-timers like “Harvest Moon”, R.E.M., or K.D. Lang’s “Ingenue”, while winking at 90s pop country via flutters of pedal steel, banjo, and fiddle. Yet all of these inspirations remain self-honest and unborrowed, modifying and underlining the crystal-clear sincerity that has come to define Shabason and Krgovich’s co-output. Four Days in June is a document of its authors looking back on their lives half-passed, finding contentment with how things have unfolded. By that very same process, Shabason and Krgovich manage to find quiet confidence in the most naturalistic version of their own creativity.