Like many post-collegiate twenty-somethings before him, the North Carolina-born Justin Morris discovered New York City was uninhabitable shortly after moving there. He worked at a cafe, explaining the basics of camping to his bewildered colleagues. He tried recording music on the bottom floors of a near-abandoned brownstone. He grew gaunt. And one day, he found himself zip-tied on a couch in his Bushwick sublet, watching as his belongings marched out in the hands of intruders.
Morris recalls the harrowing robbery midway through Companion, his third and best album as the frontman for the Durham-based Sluice, with the same wry bemusement with which he recounts a failed fishing trip where “nothing bites.” “I got tied up, spooning a stranger,” he sings on “Torpor,” shit-eating grin audible. “Get on the fucking ground” must be a terrifying command to obey, but Morris softens his assailant’s words when he sings them, surrounding them with fiddle and vocal harmony until they feel essentially indistinguishable from “have a seat.”
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On Companion, Morris’ home invasion is just another item on the list of subjects ripe for dreamy contemplation, and the list of things Morris dreamily contemplates is long: Moby Dick, God’s will, the real estate market in Durham, scoring coverage on this very website, egg and cheese sandwiches, the flood plane, Pink Moon, his dog’s shadow. He writes in rambling and loose bundles of jokes and observations, often poking fun at himself for his perceived sensitivities.
The songs spread outward from Morris’ small voice like paper towel blots. Avery Sullivan, with whom Morris also plays in the country-rock band Fust, keeps loose time on drums, tapping the snare like someone setting down coffee mugs while Libby Rodenbough scrapes out a few melody lines on her fiddle and colors empty spaces with some ghostly tremolo. But that’s about it. The band’s job is to swaddle Morris’ frayed nerve endings as he notices everything tiny and strange in his vicinity.
On his last record, Morris referred to himself, in a fit of self-deprecation, as a “cartoon Callahan,” but a more natural reference point seems to be Phil Elverum. Like Elverum, Morris loves big thoughts in small spaces and small thoughts in big ones. On “Beadie,” he savors the late-breaking miracle of his own dawning contentment with the simplest possible language: “I used to move every spring/And now I don’t.”
The humility of work seems central to Morris’ worldview, as does the tangled path separating city and country life. Mats are ripped up, power planers are set down. He has some quiet fun with the differing demands of construction work and a music career —“I could break my back lifting this beam or sending this email,” he quips on “Gator.”
With a population of 300,000, Durham is North Carolina’s fourth-largest city, but Morris sometimes writes about it as if it were a small upstate New York town with one gallery, one movie theater, and an arts scene hanging on by its fingernails. At one point, he praises a local venue for booking a performance by the underground folk legend Kath Bloom and a screening of an eco-terrorism film on the same weekend: the complicated pride of a city-country person, distilled. On the hook to “Zillow”—one of the few scrappier moments on an album that could use a few more—he poses the ultimate question of the city expat: “Where will you live?” The water is rising, as are the rents, he notes, and the dilemma sharpens itself against Sullivan’s backbeat.
