Second album from Californian duo The Saxophones, following 2018’s Songs of the Saxophones and 3 7” singles (If You’re on the Water, Aloha & Singing Desperately Suite). Recorded by Cameron Spies. Mixed by Noah Georgeson (Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart). ‘It’s so easy to stay where we are; it’s a miracle anything ever changes.’ Words you might not expect from somebody who has recently welcomed not just a second album but a second child into their world. Then again, change and movement come quite naturally to The Saxophones: this is a band who wrote their first album on board a boat, and who have called their second album Eternity Bay, fusing physical place with a spiritual sense of time. The Saxophones’ band name, however, started out as a half-joke for the song-writing project of Alexi Erenkov, then a disillusioned jazz student who’d recently ditched the instrument. Jazz didn’t offer the room for self-expression that he sought. To song-writing he turned, its straightforward, limber form a liberation from the complex musical arrangements of his university studies. The solo project became a band when Alexi’s wife Alison joined the ranks on percussion. Their debut album, Songs of the Saxophones, pitched up just before the birth of their first son in 2018. Written aboard the boat they lived on together, amid the incessant rain of a northern Californian winter, the record established The Saxophones’ style. Drawing from fifties exotica, west coast jazz, and seventies Italian lyricism, drama seeps into their deceptively simple sound, transforming dreamy surf pop into thoughtfully textured pieces, with a spaciousness at their core. But where Songs of the Saxophones interrogates the nooks of interpersonal relationships, Eternity Bay’s gaze is wider, as hinted by the album’s title. ‘My music has always grappled with mortality and the meaning of existence,’ says Alexi, ‘but the birth of our first son and the imminent arrival of our second has greatly heightened my sensitivity to these themes.’ Eternity Bay began to take shape just after the arrival of their first son, who shook up Alexi’s writing routine far more than choppy boat waters ever did. But Alexi soon noticed that the forced fragmentation of his hours, writing under inky late-night skies and through the liminal glimmer of dawn, brought to the surface new qualities in his songs. He began to dwell on ‘the human appetite for novelty, for throwing out all that came before, whether good or bad. Always starting over. Maybe this time I’ll write the song that finishes all songs.’ Perhaps it was working during these hours of transition that drew Alexi to musical influences that carry the listener to other places and times.