EP Review: Patina by Casper Sage
The Oklahoma City singer’s most single-minded EP doesn’t always vary the approach, but it never fakes the feeling.
Casper Sage grew up in Oklahoma City teaching himself guitar and production from YouTube tutorials before heading to Nashville for Belmont University, where he put out the Pseudo EP at twenty. By twenty-four, he’d released enough EPs to see each one sharpen. Winter was trial and error. SAGEhaven last year brought in midwxst and Amindi on “Roadrunner” and “NuDivision,” the first time outside voices showed up prominently. Patina closes that down to one subject. Seven songs, all addressed to the same person, all about the aftermath of losing them. Twenty-three minutes of talking to someone who already changed their number.
Sage wrote and produced almost everything here, with Henry Park, Harrison Finks, and Jake Olofsson brought in for various instrumental roles. One person’s hands are all over the boards. Guitars fuzz at the edges. Synths run in sheets below his falsetto. Drum patterns sit just behind his vocal, not up front driving the song. “Change your mind” has the EP’s widest stereo spread—a chorus that opens up like driving through an intersection with every window cracked—and a second verse where he’s “fleeing from pleading” over drums that keep the restlessness physical. “young and dumb” runs warmer, the effects dialed down, the singing doing more on its own. But the sonic ground here was drawn tight. “a distant memory” and “a lesson in transience” could have traded verses without anyone noticing.
Sage separates himself on “bits + pieces.” His verse opens from one memory and won’t let go:
“From the very first time that I first looked in your eyes
I knew in every life I would say it ‘til your tears dried.”
Halfway through, it collapses into something closer to desperation than reflection, asking where to find faith as the fragments fade, and the melody climbs right as the words give up. On “Arthur,” DERBY shows up and says what Sage won’t. “I used to want to die before I let you down” goes somewhere Sage’s careful honesty can’t reach alone. He’d been talking around the worst of it for most of Patina (still fiending, still holding on, can’t snap out of it), and DERBY walks straight to it: “Did you go and love me into someone else?” That question changes the whole song. Sage had built the wall imagery in his verse, wanting to see the person blush, not being able to see from the other side. DERBY dismantles it in eight bars. With both fists balled up in the hook, the song sounds different after that confession than before it.
The opener leaned on the same shorthand that five other tracks share—memory, holding on, still reaching, still gleaming—without a line sharp enough to stand apart from what surrounds it. “i’m dying to feel alive again” falls somewhere between the EP’s best and worst instincts. Sage asks, “How come I won’t let nobody be there for me?/How come I feel lighter when you’re leaning on me?” and those are stop-and-think questions. But the verses around them are fog. The songs on Patina that stick aren’t the ones where Sage explains what happened to him. They’re where he catches himself mid-thought (“The new me so free with old me in his blunt”), where he divides himself down the middle.
Favorite Track(s): “bits + pieces,” “Arthur,” “young dumb”