Brimming with cracked-open honesty and electrified twang, BELIEVER cements North Carolina’s Blue Cactus as a leading force in modern country and roots music. Led by songwriters Steph Stewart and Mario Arnez, the group’s third album was written over a heavy two years following their critically lauded debut BLUE CACTUS and the glitz-and-glam sophomore album STRANGER AGAIN, as Stewart battled chronic health issues and the duo reassembled their musical careers in the wake of 2020. Feeling into an arid internal landscape, Stewart found microclimates of life as she hummed melodies and jotted down phrases. On BELIEVER, Stewart’s instinct for cadence and lyricism evoke Emmylou Harris’ spacious storytelling and the dusty Southern folk melancholy of Gillian Welch while Arnez holds space for each song, tending the soil with layered folk textures, genre-hopping arrangements, and bittersweet hooks. The result is a shock of color and energy, Believer blooming as delicate, prickly, and bold as a field of wildflowers.
As a departure from earlier records, BELIEVER features Stewart as Blue Cactus’ sole lead singer, her gossamer warble setting a foundation upon which the duo’s multiple vibrant musical communities build. Recording in the buzzy indie-folk scene of their home in the Piedmont of North Carolina, and later among the country sheen of Nashville, TN, the songs transform and journey through genre and mood. On the title track, a velvety core of vocals and picked acoustic guitar crackles with barely-contained urgency before bursting into a chorus of guitar feedback and dirge-like drumming, creating a modern folk epic on par with Big Thief’s “Not” and Songs: Ohia’s “Farewell Transmission.” The folky ramble “Resolution” plods and plucks with the help of Arnez’s delicate acoustic guitar picking, a locked-in Tennessee rhythm section, and close harmonies by Arnez and fellow Southern singer-songwriter Erin Rae.
Growing up with a musical family in rural Ashland, Virginia, Gudasz first found her affinity for music by learning to play flute at age five, and soon started writing songs of her own. She later taught herself to play piano and guitar, drawing inspiration from use of alternate tunings in developing her own distinct style. Although she spent time in folk and rock bands after heading to North Carolina for college (where she studied Acting and Creative Writing), Gudasz has continued to strike off on her own with her lushly textured, sculpted singular sound. In the past few years alone, the Durham, North Carolina-based singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist has shared stages with the likes of Ray Davies, Cat Power and Sharon Van Etten as part of the Big Star’s Third tribute concerts, opened for Television and toured from the US with Teenage Fanclub to Europe with the Mountain Goats, and appeared as a background vocalist on albums by Superchunk and Hiss Golden Messenger, making her TV debut with the latter on Late Night with Seth Meyers.
