CCMusic.com

Everything is alright now. Alex Brown Church - the man behind the dark folk, indie rock band Sea Wolf - wants you to know that from the start. Really. Sea Wolf's eagerly anticipated fifth LP, Through A Dark Wood, proves it in 11 textured, sometimes-acoustic, sometimes-electronic, unabashedly honest tracks. But beforehand, everything was decidedly not okay. Church wrote and recorded an entire album after 2014's streaming-only, stripped down album Song Spells No. 1: Cedarsmoke, but decided to scrap it. He realized those songs lacked a through-line and felt conceptually disjointed, something he attributes to a sense of denial of what had been going behind the scenes - dealing with the disintegration of a long-term relationship, reconciling with the death of an estranged parent, and trying to cope with the magnitude of current events, all while maintaining a passionately beloved, yet slow-burning creative career.