Between Days is only five songs long, but it establishes a remarkably complete emotional environment almost immediately. Far Caspian works with the familiar materials of dream pop and bedroom indie: chiming guitars soaked in reverb, soft distant vocals, warm bass, crisp drums and arrangements that feel intentionally hazy around their edges. What makes the record work is how naturally those sounds attach themselves to uncertainty. Nothing here feels aggressively miserable, yet almost every song contains somebody trying to locate themselves after something has already shifted. Relationships are failing, memories are being replayed, home exists partly as geography and partly as an idea, and even moments of escape arrive with the knowledge that whatever is being escaped from will eventually have to be faced again.
The title track establishes that atmosphere beautifully. “Between Days” does not begin with a dramatic statement. It begins with uncertainty about direction. Seasons blur together throughout the song: winter coats, autumn leaves, summer haze, pine trees and cold weather all occupy the same memory. That seasonal movement makes time feel unreliable. The narrator remembers people and places through weather rather than through a neat chronology, which is exactly how memory often behaves. Years compress into a few physical sensations. A particular coat. A city street. Trees. Cold air. Somebody standing nearby. The guitars reinforce that feeling by shimmering around the vocal rather than forcing it into the foreground. Johnston’s voice often sounds as though it is arriving from inside the memory rather than narrating from safely outside it.
“Blue” tightens the emotional focus. The relationship at its center is obviously failing, and the song understands something unusually useful about that kind of failure: knowing something will not work does not cause the attachment to disappear. The repeated idea of having to let something hurt becomes almost practical advice delivered from inside the situation rather than afterward. The verses contain little domestic memories, unanswered calls, a basement, smoke, dry lips, dancing while wasted. None of these details is especially monumental on its own, but together they produce the specificity of a relationship that has already become more vivid in recollection than it may have felt while happening. Musically, Far Caspian keeps the sadness buoyant. The rhythm continues moving while the guitars create enough air that the song never collapses into melodrama.
That balance is one of the EP’s strongest qualities. Between Days is nostalgic without treating nostalgia as uncomplicated comfort. Memory is attractive here precisely because the present feels uncertain. The past becomes somewhere to visit when the future has not yet acquired a recognizable shape. A contemporary review described the record in terms of nostalgia, solitude and wandering, and that is accurate, but the EP never sounds completely isolated. These songs keep reaching outward. Someone is being called. Someone is being remembered. Someone is being asked to leave the house, drive somewhere, work something out. Even loneliness retains another person’s outline.
“The Place” is probably the record’s most concentrated expression of that inwardness. The lyrics repeatedly return to the head, the bed, advice that has stopped being useful, and an “unknown place” that sounds simultaneously threatening and attractive. The song catches that peculiar state where indecision itself becomes comfortable. Staying confused can be easier than choosing because choosing creates consequences. The vocal delivery remains restrained while the surrounding guitars soften the edges of that anxiety, giving the song an almost weightless quality even when the words are circling self-doubt. Far Caspian’s production repeatedly performs that trick: difficult emotions are not translated into harsh sound. They are allowed to float.
“Let’s Go Outside” is where the record starts trying to break the enclosure. Even the title sounds like somebody opening a door after spending too much time thinking. The song repeatedly proposes movement: go outside, drive, work things out, find out what life is about. It is a wonderfully modest response to existential confusion. There is no revelation waiting at the end of the road. Going somewhere is valuable because remaining motionless has stopped helping. The arrangement reflects that shift. The song feels broader and more open, still carrying the hazy Far Caspian guitar sound but allowing the rhythm to give the track a stronger forward pull. It is less about solving anything than interrupting stagnation.
That idea makes “Finding My Way Home” the natural ending. Home appears here through the lake house, old pine trees and the recognition that time has passed whether the narrator was prepared for it or not. The song jumps between days and years, departure and return, damage and rebuilding. Home is not presented as a magical place where everything becomes correct again. Finding the way home is an action, something repeatedly attempted while feeling displaced. That gives the closing song more weight than a simple nostalgic return would have had. The past cannot actually be re-entered. The landscape remains, but the person approaching it has changed.
Across all five songs, nature keeps appearing whenever language starts struggling with emotion. Autumn leaves, pine trees, snow, summer, rain, gardens, a lake house, cold air. The natural imagery gives the EP an unusually visual quality without requiring complicated storytelling. Far Caspian often writes as though emotional memory is stored geographically. A feeling belongs to a street, a basement, a house, a line of trees or a season. The result is music that can feel intensely familiar even when the listener has never visited any of the actual places being described.
The production is equally important to that effect. Johnston’s DIY approach does not use lo-fi aesthetics as an excuse for unfinished sound. The EP is carefully controlled, but it preserves enough softness and distance to keep the music intimate. Guitars frequently occupy the emotional foreground more strongly than the voice. They shimmer, repeat and hang around after individual notes should have disappeared. Reverb creates the sensation that every sound leaves a faint memory of itself behind. The drums provide definition without breaking the atmosphere, giving the songs enough physical structure that the haze never turns shapeless.
There is also very little unnecessary excess. Five tracks, around twenty minutes, and the record is finished. That compact size suits the material. Between Days captures a state rather than attempting to document an entire life. The title itself describes that suspended quality perfectly. These are songs made in the spaces between certainty: between seasons, relationships, homes, decisions and versions of oneself. The EP never announces that everything will eventually work out. Its optimism is smaller and more believable than that. Leave the room. Drive somewhere. Let it hurt. Rebuild. Look for the road home.
That is probably why the record has continued finding listeners long after 2018. Far Caspian did not invent hazy guitars, bedroom recording or songs about feeling lost. Between Days succeeds because those familiar materials are arranged with unusual emotional clarity. The record understands that confusion does not always sound chaotic. Sometimes it sounds beautiful, slow and strangely comfortable. Sometimes being lost becomes a place of its own, and for twenty minutes Far Caspian makes that place remarkably easy to inhabit.
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