Over DUMB HOPE’s 11 indie-folk tracks, Von Bieker offers up a cinematic antidote to modern despair.
With his second album, Von Bieker builds on the strong songwriting and production that took his debut Long For This World to number 3 on the CKUA Radio top 30 in 2021. The featured single “We Don’t Even Fight Anymore” already passed 10,000 streams in its first month, signaling more growth to come.
DUMB HOPE expands Von Bieker’s sonic palette with producer Paul Zacharias’ acoustic Americana instrumentation, including banjo, dobro, and lap steel. Von Bieker and Zacharias contrast those earthy sounds with otherworldly electronic percussion, layered soundscapes, lo-fi synths, and ambient electric guitars. Fans of Sufjan Stevens, Pheobe Bridgers, His Golden Messenger, The Tallest Man on Earth, and Gregory Alan Isakov will feel right at home.
Guest artists from across Alberta join Von Bieker to round out the band with cello, horns, and more – including a duet with Calgary’s TAYLR. The title track even features a choir of voice memos collected from supporters across North America who helped fund the record via a crowdfunding campaign.
The album began when Von Bieker presented High River producer Paul Zacharias with the collection of songs he’d been working on throughout the global pandemic. There were immediate sparks. Having self-produced his first record, Von Bieker wanted to remain involved and Zacharias agreed to coproduce. The two would gather in Zacharias’ High River Studio to lay down foundations, then spend months apart building on those ideas. As the sessions came to a close, careful edits distilled each track. The result is a well-aged collection that took time to breathe.
Thematically, DUMB HOPE starts and ends with cosmic questions.
If I walk out into the sea
Will the waves carry me?
Von Bieker is asking if he is alone, of if someone will be there to break his fall.
The many faces of that fall – and the many hands that might arrive to stop it – form the stories of DUMB HOPE’S 11 tracks. The stories play out as vivid as cinema as we enter devastating darkness through songs like What You Don’t Know and We Don’t Even Fight Anymore, while the light shines through on tracks like “Asheville,” “Dumb Hope,” and “Hold You Up.”
The album closes with Von Bieker once again alone at the water’s edge in Azaleas – surrounded by beauty and awaiting a return. It’s left to the listener to decide wither that waiting is in vain.
I wait for you
To burst back through
These garden gates
Oh I wait