Rubblebucket’s seeds were sown when Kalmia Traver and Alex Toth, the group’s front persons, co-writers and co-producers, first began a friendship as jazz students at the University of Vermont. Soon after, they formed Rubblebucket, using the project to delve into pop, funk, dance and psychedelia; performances have spanned Bonnaroo to Glastonbury to their self-curated Dream Picnic Festival, and they’ve collaborated with kindred genre-blenders including Arcade Fire and Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears. Their forthcoming full-length LP ‘Year of the Banana’ is perhaps their deepest and grooviest work yet. It speaks to the power of transforming and adapting relationships in a time when the world needs it most.
Hannah Mohan’s new album is a first in more ways than one. Time Is a Walnut is the first solo release from the Western Massachusetts singer and songwriter, after nearly a decade fronting indie-pop band And the Kids. The album also comes amid the longest stretch Mohan has spent in one place since she left home at 16 to hop freight trains and hitchhike across North America.
Making music has been at the center of Mohan’s life ever since, even as other circumstances have changed—sometimes radically. A long-term relationship crumbled in 2019. Then the pandemic arrived, bringing an end to her band. After writing a batch of new songs taking stock of her situation, Mohan asked Alex Toth of Rubblebucket and Tōth to produce them, the latest installment of a longtime friendship and occasional creative collaboration.
Although Time Is a Walnut is a breakup album, don’t go in expecting tearjerkers. Mohan draws from a richer palette here, with themes of messy eroticism on the sultry “Soaked,” altered consciousness on the buzzy rocker “Heaven and Drugs” and confounding expectations (including your own) on “Rebel.” Lady Lamb, a fellow icon in the queer community, guests on the deceptively sunny “Hell,” and Mohan vents her anger on the tightly coiled “Peace Be the Day” as she seeks to make sense of her breakup. Throughout, the songs showcase Mohan’s powerful voice, prismatic melodicism and distinctive lyrical sensibility as she processes major events in her life.