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| Bowerbirds - Upper Air |
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| Written by Julia Reidy | |
 BowerbirdsUpper Air [Dead Oceans] Get It at Amazon  “One morning you wake to find you are shackled to your bed/ And bound and gagged/ Oh my, what a predicament,” Phil Moore sings to begin “House of Diamonds,” the lead-off track of Bowerbirds’ sophomore LP. That certainly would be a predicament, but not to worry; “You were free/ You were already free,” the song reassures as Beth Tacular’s high, clear voice joins Moore’s. Two years after the self-release and one year after the re-release of the North Carolina trio’s first full-length Hymns for a Dark Horse, they’ve returned with Upper Air, an album consistent with their debut but that shows clear signs of evolution. See, they were already free. Hymns betrayed the band’s organic, unshackled ways of writing, playing and living. (Moore and Tacular are a couple and lived in an Airstream trailer in the woods before they built their own log cabin.) The album explored almost exclusively themes of respect for nature, of living harmoniously with it and with the world as a whole. On Upper Air they still use pretty, harmonized vocal hooks and minimalist, acoustic instrumentation like accordion, piano and hand-held bass drum. They still pepper their folk songs with a darker, more intense gypsy number here or there; see “Beneath Your Tree.” But everything has grown richer, deeper. There are more layers under each characteristically meandering melody, and Moore’s lyrics have turned inward, not necessarily away from nature, but toward the human aspects of it as well. Hymns featured song titles like “Bur Oak” and “Hooves,” while Upper Air has one called “Crooked Lust” (which is a really wonderful song). Both, as whole works, struggle with humanity’s place in the world, but tracks like “Northern Lights” on Upper speaks directly to a romantic interest; it’s the most straightforward love song we’ve heard from Bowerbirds so far. (“Northern Lights” is also a departure in terms of percussion – it uses a typical drum set at the front of the mix.) Not that on Hymns they didn’t, but on Upper Air the band just sounds excited – at peace and happy. Maybe some thematic struggle they were waging has been partially resolved. Maybe the broader scope of these new songs is as promising to perform as it is to hear. Maybe they’ve released themselves, and us, in the process. |
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