Libby Rodenbough is from Greensboro, North Carolina, and has played with the four-piece folk band Mipso for more than a decade. Her debut album as a solo artist, Spectacle of Love—an intimate, inventive chronicle of heartache and abjection—was released in 2020; she has also built up numerous collaborations in the tight-knit North Carolina music scene. Her second release, Between the Blades, is eight tracks long, but most songs clock in long, at around four minutes, lingering in observant, character-driven storytelling and slipping between diametrics—light and dark, cynicism and optimism, land and sea—as Between the Blades makes its way toward the aching chords of closer “Waking World.” In that last song, Rodenough imagines “reaching out” through the veil between dream states and touching a loved one's hand. Listening, it is easy to feel that you are in the same room, a hand reaching out to yours as it wades through the muck of the world we’ve been given, even as we look toward the possibility of another world. -Sarah Edwards