The Bollard Bulletin for July 7, 2025
Local Music Monday: Fire & Flood have arrived
Local Music Monday
Fire & Flood is the duo of singer/songwriters Adam Davison and Christopher Teret, who also have a New York-based folk-rock band called Company. On 2023’s Carry Me Down, Davison’s singing and songs were the focus. On this year’s Broken Pieces, it’s Teret’s, whose other songwriting partnership, with Chriss Sutherland of Cerberus Shoal and Fire on Fire fame, developed into the peerless Maine folk-rock group Snaex.
Teret’s singing and songwriting are more understated than those of his collaborators. He sings in a calm and comfortable tone and his lyrics do more hinting than telling, though the broad emotional message always leaks through.
“Christ alive after he died / Waiting down by the riverside,” goes the chorus of the first track, “Christ Alive.” And Christ continues to cool His heels while the song’s protagonist drops cryptic lines like, “I’m runnin’ through the city with my long clothes on / Lining up my palms,” and, “There’s risks in every action / So just take your pick / You know the game is fixed.” By the end, he’s in jail, conceding in a letter to his love, “my plans have failed,” though what those plans were is anyone’s guess.
“Fire & Flood captures our engagement with a microcosmic apocalypse, the breakdown of the soul in response to emotional experience,” the two wrote when the first record came out. “It's also got a lonesome cowboy hobo dirty shitkicker kind of vibe.” That’s all true, too.
The devil, as usual, is in the details — Teret’s passing observations of little tells that speak of larger tragedies. In “On Faith,” it’s the “sad lady” who sang “all the lows notes” by the piano, then “coughed into her drink as we went to get our coats.”
The heartbreak of “My Always One” is plain to see, as is Teret’s considerable skill as a poet. On the lone rock number here, “The Me That I Call Home,” he sings post-breakup, “Now I walk the world soaked in another woman’s gaze / I guess there’s no escaping from the mirror or the maze.”
This subdued, contemplative album will not lift your spirits, but it will assure you that you’re not alone in mourning this hopelessly broken world, and even its ugliness can inspire beautiful music.
Highlights
Speaking of suggestive, emotionally intense, artfully done folk-rock, the Brooklyn-based duo She Keeps Bees delivers that too, led by singer/songwriter Jessica Larrabee, with music producer Andy LaPlant on drums. They perform at Prism Analog (34 Preble St., Portland) at 7 p.m. Tix: $15-$30 (sliding scale; all ages).