Current Joys: East My Love (CD)

East My Love, the resplendent, country-tinged 12th album by Current Joys, feels familiar. It’s meant to: the 12 songs contained within dive deep into the rich folklore of the American West to tell time-worn tales of love and trauma, heartbreak and spiritual renewal. Cast with a warm glow and finding Current Joys’ Nick Rattigan tapping into some of his lushest, most high-fidelity production to date, it’s the kind of album that listeners could see themselves within, and, hopefully, keep close when they’re most in need of reassurance or escapism. For Rattigan, though, it’s all that and more.

Rattigan wrote East My Love alone in the woods in Tennessee, with no cell reception and nobody in earshot for miles. Composed three years before Love + Pop, the experimental pop double record he released in 2023 and 2024, the songs on East My Love felt too raw to confront until he felt well and truly out from underneath the cloud that had been cast over him.

Rattigan describes the songs as “landmines” that, for years, threatened to upend his carefully balanced mental state. “They were just triggers that would put me back in this emotional space, and I think eventually I got to a place where they were more comforting,” he recalls. “That’s what I hope people find out of the record – a solace from any anxieties or depressions.”

1. Echoes Of The Past
   
2. California Rain
   
3. Days Of Heaven
   
4. Never Seen A Rose
   
5. Lullaby For The Lost
   
6. Oh Sister
7. They Shoot Horses
   
8. Slowly Like The Wind
9. Tormenta
   
10. Sister Christian
    
11. East My Love
    
12. Feelin’ Groovy