Written by What if the warm beacon of home glowed with the patriotic colors of a mid-tier gas station logo? This is the sign that appears in the mist of Maria BC’s Marathon, named for the service station that stood at the end of their street as a child that marked both their departure out into the world and the soft embrace of homecoming. As symbols go, it’s potent, nearly to the point of delirium. But everything that happens on this album—the threadbare folk songs, the clattering of unusual percussion, the arc of Maria BC’s voice, so soft its edges turn into a fibrous gum like wet notebook paper—would occur in the dark were it not for the glow that stretches from the distance. From the petroleum haze of the opening title track onward, Marathon is an unequivocally beautiful album. But it’s beautiful in the same way as the colors kicked into the sunset by a refinery—it’s unnatural, uncomfortable, a byproduct of labor.
Blame it on the many ways in which the world has become more dire since Maria BC released Spike Field in 2023, but the aggressively overcast Marathon feels (alongside recent and upcoming albums from Midwife and Kathryn Mohr) like part of an extended cultural response to the mounting omnicrisis—an attempt to make something beautiful despite having a tension headache. The spirit of protest here is contextual rather than explicit, evoking an exhaustion similar to the darkness Bruce Springsteen captured in Nebraska as Vietnam drifted into the Reagan era. The characters in Maria BC’s songs are never not aware of how completely the deck has been stacked against them, nor do they flatter themselves with the idea of relief. “Drink hair of the dog at dawn/Get ready for work at 8,” they sing in “Rare,” while what sounds like bones rattle like delirium tremens behind them.
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“Rare” is a tender song sung from the perspective of someone watching the light in their beloved’s eyes slowly go out. “Life has made you rare and raw,” they sing, “anxious for your god’s command.” The love the narrator has for the other person is obvious, palpable, and mostly unspoken. You can hear it in the steadiness of Maria BC’s voice; the way they maintain the elegance of the melody while the dour mood threatens to drag it into despair feels like an expression of devotion.
It’s one of many moments in which Maria BC uses their uncanny vocal control to complicate the stories they’re telling. While mechanical pings and a distorted bass that pulses like a broken stoplight drive “The sound,” they trace an abyssal vocal line. “Phone receiver hum, electric hiss,” they sing, as if being forced into the depths of their register, the words so low they almost don’t want to be acknowledged. Maria BC pushes back. “Simulate the sound of all the years falling,” they continue as the melody swoops upward. It’s an odd inversion—surely the sound of all the years falling should resemble collapse, not triumph. In the context of the song, though, the ability to withstand suffering takes on a kind of nobility—not as a good in itself but as a sign of perseverance. “Angels, don’t speak/Listen to me,” they command in a falsetto that sounds like Joni Mitchell for the age of normalized paganism.
Absorbing Marathon’s clutter can at times feel like walking into a used bookstore in which the ensconced owner has merged with the inventory; there’s a lot going on, and the human presence at its center feels like merely another piece in a huge puzzle. While the narrator of “As the earth turns” clocks out and tests pickup lines at the local (“I wanna savor your mind”), you can feel the exhaustion creeping up the edges of the song while percussion clacks away to the apathetic rhythm of a distant oil derrick. Strobe-chopped splashes of water throb through “Port authority,” lapping up against an almost cartoonishly tick-tocking clock. In “Rare,” an acoustic guitar feeds back with a carefully controlled buzz, like an electric wire running through the middle of the song.
So much machinery. It feels inescapable, and Maria BC’s patient delivery of these songs suggests a kind of resignation, like they’ve come to terms with the limits of what a good life might look like. As a result, listening to Marathon can feel like watching a memory fade knowing you can’t stop it, not even being sure if it was real to begin with. In the album’s press notes, they say it’s “sinister” that capitalism can attach our fondest memories to the logo of a company that’s helping to destroy the world. And yet, with a vision as clear as their voice, they suggest that there’s a kind of miracle at work there, too, that the human spirit could be so strong it penetrates the center of capitalism’s heart and, like a brown bird nesting in a Texaco sign, makes a home for itself in even the worst circumstances.
