Catherine Elicson
Born under a Virgo Sun in Ohio’s fertile musical landscape, the now Philadelphia-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Catherine Elicson steps out on her own to release her mesmerizing debut solo album River Of Fat. From humble beginnings, Elicson cut her teeth in the Columbus punk scene before moving to Philadelphia to drum for the solo project of Allison Crutchfield. Elicson is primarily known for her virtuosic guitar playing and wooly, melodic vocals as part of her indie rock band Empath. Elicson and Empath began releasing music in 2016 and have continued to write, record, and tour, sharing their off-kilter, shimmering, and explosive rock ‘n’ roll vision with fans around the world. Through their journey, Empath has released music with Fat Possum Records and toured with bands like Modest Mouse, Iceage, Mannequin Pussy, and most recently, Robber Robber. While enamored with her working relationship with Empath, Elicson found herself wanting to push her creative boundaries further. In the pursuit of self-exploration and musical experimentation, Elicson retreated to her home with a guitar, 4-track, sampler, and synth and began to write her bedroom odyssey River Of Fat, out on Community Music in the Fall of 2026.
In January 2024, with the help of longtime collaborator and audio engineer Shaun Sutkus, Elicson began capturing and mixing River Of Fat using a droning Korg, a Roland SP-404, a vintage Stratocaster, and a Tascam 4-track tape machine. Inspired by legends like John Cale, The Urinals, and contemporaries like Amen Dunes, Elicson sought to test her own capabilities through a minimal palette of instrumentation. Each song was performed live to tape in its entirety, with the goal of creating recordings that could be faithfully recreated on stage, performed alone and in the same manner they were recorded. Through this process and its self-imposed limitations, she discovered a new, more vulnerable and tender voice in her songwriting.
River Of Fat’s opening track “I’m On Fire” is a foggy, linear tune propelled by a motorik drum machine, arpeggiating brightly colored keyboard, and muscling fuzzy guitar riffs. Above them, Elicson’s rich, tuneful vocals hover like spring rain clouds lit by the sun. On the largely instrumental "All Sound," glittering guitar picking emerges through billows of fuzz, creating one of the album's most meditative passages. "My War" strips everything back to guitar and voice, where delayed vocal melodies shudder and glow above trembling riffs, hanging in the air like a prayer. On "Figure," Elicson's warm, warbled vocals explore memories and past lives blurred by time, as if seen through warped glass, before the song collapses into a scrappy, tuneful guitar solo. “Flowers Smile” is a vibrant and dancey bop decorated with hand-claps and cascading synths that conjure visions of a lonely traveler pulled over on the side of the road and dancing in the cool night air. Ultimately, River Of Fat is a psychedelic yet romantic fever dream. The recording is tastefully degraded, sounding like a warped tape unearthed from a bargain bin at a garage sale that you play over and over until either the tape or the tape player ceases to operate.
While River Of Fat is Catherine Elicson's first solo release, it feels less like a debut than the beginning of a larger body of work. The album shares a quiet kinship with the intimate worlds of Arthur Russell, Sibylle Baier, and Brian Eno, finding beauty in restraint, atmosphere, and texture. Patient, intimate, and quietly expansive, these songs reveal an artist discovering new possibilities through limitation and finding a voice that feels at once deeply personal and strangely timeless. Catherine Elicson’s River Of Fat is an eternal rainbow refracting directly into your heart.
