There is a lot of history sitting inside “Hindsight (Deluxe Edition),” and you can hear it without needing the band to spell everything out.
Courtney Birk and Ashleigh Coffelt have been working on this record for years. Almost ten years, in fact. That changes how I hear it. This isn’t just a collection of songs that were written, recorded and pushed out into the world in the same year. Some of these songs come from an earlier version of their lives. They have had time to grow, change, and look at those experiences again.
And the song titles tell you quite a bit. “The Victim.” “Growing Pains.” “Erase You.” “Brace For Impact.” Even “20/20” feels fitting for a record called Hindsight. There is a lot here about relationships, mistakes, difficult moments and the things we understand differently once enough time has passed. The two new songs are probably the most interesting part of the deluxe release for me. “Waking Up” and “Clarity” have been added as an epilogue, which makes sense. They are not just there to give fans two extra tracks. They bring the record somewhere new. The original album looks back at what happened. These songs seem to come from the point where Courtney and Ashleigh have had enough distance to actually make sense of it. Their sound suits that perfectly. The guitars have plenty of reverb and the production can get quite atmospheric, but the vocals keep the songs feeling close. Their harmonies are a big part of that. There is something almost conversational about the way the two voices sit together.
CA in LA are also not only musicians. Courtney and Ashleigh have made more than 200 short films together, along with work in painting, ceramics and other forms of art. That background probably has something to do with the visual quality of their music. Their songs often feel like they could belong to a scene in a film. But you don’t really need to know any of that to connect with Hindsight. At its core, it is about something pretty simple. We all have things in our past that looked one way when we were living through them and completely different years later. Sometimes you finally understand why something happened. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you just stop blaming yourself for it. That is where the deluxe edition seems to land. Not in forgetting the past, but in being able to look at it without feeling trapped by it.
English