Trilogies usually don’t end well. The Rise Of Skywalker was a mess. The Matrix Revolutions was worse. Remember the third Godfather movie? (Of course you don’t.) Well, at least the third Back To The Future movie where they go back to the Old West and Doc falls in love with Mary Steenburgen was kind of fun.

BUT ANYWAY. Milwaukee’s Caley Conway is here to break the end-of-trilogy curse with “Bliss Or Bust,” the final installment in her three-track EP of the same name. “I Love You So Much I Don’t Want To See You” was great. “Path Of The Sun” was even better. And now the shuffling, heavy-lidded “Bliss Or Bust” comes in and sweeps the ceremony, a la The Return Of The King in 2004. That one was pretty good, too.

“I wrote ‘Bliss Or Bust’ about that precarious notion that a romantic relationship will deliver us from a state of anguish into a state of bliss,” Conway says. “The narrator (…me?) is desperate for a lasting escape from her discomfort; convinced it’ll be brought on by the love and desire of another.”

Oh, and there’s another DIY video, too, and it’s equally great. The parts where Conway projects herself on a window and then pulls the shades up or down are terrific.

“I recorded the EP with my friend James Paul Mitchell (originally from Milwaukee) in Nashville, out of his home studio at the end of 2019,” Conway says. “We hired Nashville drummer Jake Finch (Lucy Dacus) to play drums on it. Twenty-twenty was spent in post-production, mixing, remote tracking, and stalling in the hopes that live shows and touring might be a possibility again before releasing the project. Since that obviously didn’t happen, I decided to make these music videos as companions for each song, sending them out into the world one-by-one over the last two months. It’s been my hope that they provide a rich alternative to the experience of live performance, for the listener. This has been my first foray into creating video.”

Conway isn’t releasing the Bliss Or Bust EP on Spotify or other “mega subscription-based streaming platforms,” so you can support her directly at Bandcamp and/or Patreon. Also, the line “I’m on nightmares and all a-jitter at the job / I get home, get loaded and drift off” is perfect.

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Matt Wild weighs between 140 and 145 pounds. He lives on Milwaukee's east side.