Local band Prairie Scout will release their debut album “What’s Ahead is Behind Me” on Jan. 31, marking a new height for a band that already seemed to emerge fully formed. Prairie Scout is led by songwriter and vocalist Natalie Ingalls, with drummer Wesley Davis, bassist Julia Fegelman and guitarist John Hasey.
“I’ve been looking for the real thing,” Ingalls confesses in the bittersweet “Green & Blue,” which opens with snippets of conversation and laughter and wonders: “Do you live for the moments? But the moments go away / Do you live for people? But the people never stay.”
“What’s Ahead is Behind Me” navigates the cyclical nature of life’s events — heartbreak, getting older, reflecting on the past — through a deep connection to the natural world both in Ingall’s folk-inspired lyrical imagery and recorded moments of nature. There’s both a confessional and vulnerable quality to the album but with a strength of emotion and clear-eyed wisdom in heavier guitar riffs and percussion and dreamier melodic bass lines.
The album opens with “Moments,” a track of trickling rain and thunder, clipped dialogue and laughter. It’s a cinematic opening that feels like flipping through a stack of snapshots from a family photo album, introducing the album’s lush storm-soaked landscape.
“Am I Different, I Wonder?” showcases the band’s confident full-bodied sound and a jangly bright guitar solo. Ingalls asks throughout the song, “What I would give to go back…What would you give to go back?” It’s a youthful question perhaps, but nothing about this opening track is unsure of itself.
The track encapsulates what the album will wonder about throughout: that things come back around and around again. “I fall, I fall into the undergrowth / You follow, follow me underground / We start we start each day a little higher / We scrape the sky and then we hurdle down,” Ingalls sings in “Undergrowth.”
The band’s latest single, “Honeysuckle,” balances cheerful riffs and sunny indie rock stylings with rich lyrical imagery with an underlying sorrow and uncertainty, the fear of letting someone down. It’s a centerpiece to the album’s deft hand, transversing soulful poetry with noisy indie rock.
“Better to Lose,” incorporating rushing water, glistening piano and haunting vocals anchored by sliding bass, flows into “Ivy,” one of the album’s stand-out ballads about reflecting on time gone by, searching among ivy-covered tombstones for answers. It’s a song at the heart of the misty world of honest wonderings that “What’s Ahead is Behind Me” is interested in, while leading into the eye of the storm of a crashing crescendo of percussion and a chorus of screams set against a powerful guitar solo.
Across the album, Prairie Scout slips into darker pools of moody self-reflection. “One trip around the sun means nothing,” Ingalls begins in “An Absolutely Remarkable Thing” over a wavering bass line that eventually erupts into a more gnarly guitar, like a meteor crashing to earth.
Through carefully crafted lyricism and a rich sonic landscape, Prairie Scout achieves an assured vision of reflections on the past and future while looking to the quiet cycles of the natural world for answers. It’s an album that feels grown rather than produced and is an exciting entry to a band that’s only getting started.
Editor’s note: Natalie Ingalls previously worked at the IDS.