I’ve lost track of how many pieces of music criticism I’ve read bemoaning the decline of the album as a total statement. More rare, if less elusive in name, would be the EP of equivalent sweep, a single-sitting listen wherein any track is as instantly indelible as the whole. Happily, “Philadelphus”, the new recording by Slow Dancers, is that fond object. Brief as a memory in concentrate, but with a photographic depth, each of these four songs captures a world. There is a thusness to this music, as the clear and spacious arrangements, the vastness and concision of the lyrics, conspire to something utterly companionable.

There are seasons to these songs, non-exclusive and exacting. In each one may observe a weather-word or floral sign-post, like kigo in Japanese poetry: the seasonal phrase that cinches a verse’s scenery. Songwriter Jesse Hill’s lyric miniatures are every bit as deft as haiku, although they appear tributary of a flexible Anglo-American lyric, too; the short lines and subtle end-rhymes reminiscent of a Larkin or Ciardi, whose formal verses nonetheless hew closely to speech. But these are songs as well as poems, and however well Hill’s lyrics work as page poetry, there is a tension between the purposes of sight and song. Reading alongside these melodies, one experiences a double enjambment—the voice like a breeze across stanzas, filling and exceeding the height and weight of words.

“Envious Brother” is a mostly chordal toe-tapping vignette, all wistful twang with a two-bar crescendo for a chorus. A harmonica moan places this lyric somewhere beside the road, a conduit the singer can’t but follow with his eyes. Cole Woods’ cascading drum fills counterpose softly descending vocal harmonies: “my face/ablaze”—a resonant fragment of a sentence spanning chorus to verse, near-rhyme binding the phrase—“with the harsh blush of envy,” sings a bashful brother in the weeds, watching himself watching.

“Window Light” is a wintry miniature built on a rising-and-falling melodic figure, stated in unison and elaborated by degrees until a gorgeous sense of space opens between the instruments. The depth of the recording makes salient the matter of this space: the whorl of thumbprint under plectrum, the dance of dust between amplifier tubes, or the hush of the drums between strokes. An aspirant trumpet swells beneath the snaking theme, spring beckoning beneath the snow.

The sublime tableau supporting these songs exceeds the purposes of whatever picturesque, and contradicts the author’s bearing. “Alien Spring” follows a wandering figure, “anticipating/an altered self/to suit the altering earth,” which continuum is emblematized by the sight of a dead bird bloating in the wet. However, any would-be epiphany stalls at the threshold of the perceiver, “soaking and otherwise un-changed/there amid the alien spring.” It is the element itself that appears alien, not the poet interloper who cannot but voice his surroundings. A singable bassline supports a swaying chorus: like the body held in silhouette by rain, traced by rivulets, a comforting presence returns.

“Mock Orange”, begins in hesitation, Marie-France Hollier’s bass guitar pensively pedalling beneath sustained notes. This is a moving song, of geographical displacement and marked retrospection in its wake. “Our mock orange, divested of its epithets,/broke into blossom, as our U-Haul met/the east’s dark”—the EP’s eponymous flower blooms as night closes around the vehicle. “Divested of its epithets,” no longer decorative but utterly unique, the flower is a watchful symbol as its convoy tunnels rain and dark. The vocal delivery is sparing, perhaps a syllable or two per bar, such that the dense internal rhyme of the lyric is diffused. In this sense the song sweetly relays the breach between experience and the present of its recollection; the meaning of a given moment is withheld the senses but elsewhere assured. Moreover, refreshingly, the song is an anti-aubade of sorts: dawn is a different kind of omen where the two are enclosed and going somewhere, together.

Four songs and to each a season; then, like any great collection, these are occasions for occasions, associations that accrue to each upon repeated listening. It is striking, then, that “Philadelphus” is bookended by the recollection of another’s travel—“From the garden I watch them disappear”—and a story of the author’s own departure. It is expected that these songs should travel, as they will, and well. I’m glad to have them in my head already.