Born from a shared love of Aerial M, Lung Fish and other contemplative, cyclical and slow moving rock music from the Chicago and Louisville scenes, Fire Nearby are a guitar duo exploring long-form automatic song writing for the autumn season. Although McLean and Birchall have tussled together in a variety of free-improv groups over the last decade, their friendship has always been rooted in similar formative years spent gigging in, obsessing over and learning to play guitar to the same post-everything bands. It was both natural and inevitable that their first foray making music together would be in tribute to these early influences.

Recorded over several afternoons in October, Birchall and McLean have crafted each of the 9 songs on 'Fruits of Patience' more like open ended questions, stumbling over each others melodic refrains like one continuous, pondering conversation. That's not to say there isn't shifts in mood and temperament, which swing from the crisp, major melodic uplift of 'Grass Filled With Rain' to the gloomy, haunted dirge of 'Tears of Cotton Mills'. The latter features poet Lauren McLean, whose one-take improvised reading blends stark images of industrial revolution workhouses alongside auras of empty playgrounds, happened upon in a now forgotten childhood. There's even the gentle appearance of field recordings on 'Night Bus Through Furzton' and closer 'Angel On The Roof', expanding the duos music out of the garage and into a spaces more grandiose.

And although this is some of the quietest and inward looking music either have made, there are powerful and transcendent moments that blossom with slow diligence in many of McLean and Birchall's songs, calling to mind the redemptive arcs of crestfallen characters that populate in the works of Russell Banks, Richard Ford, Don Delillo and Annie Proulx, to name a few writers that also inspired these sounds.