Port O’Brien’s Van Pierszalowski has one of those lives straight out of Jack London. Born and bred in Cambria, California, he spends chunks of the year in Alaska working for his father’s gruelling fishing business. He has a girlfriend who is the Head Baker at Larsen Bay, Alaska. Her name? Cambria.

She’s in the band too. Much has been made of the fact Port O’Brien’s music and lyrics are inspired by their natural surroundings, especially when artists like Bon Iver and The Decemberists have cornered that niche. But like those artists, Port O’Brien use nature as merely a poignant backdrop to some familiar concerns: ‘Fisherman’s Son’, the album’s most poetic track, deals with the problems of youthful aspiration against cold practical reality, while ‘Don’t Take My Advice’ has the line ‘I’m not ready to settle down / And I just started looking round’. Oh and the sound itself is a cross section of Crazy Horse, The Byrds and The Band, as it could only be.
Barnaby Smith