The Reverie Machine: Not By Blood

Sam

Raise your hands for the Reverie

And they all shall be “Joyful Captives”

The chorus rules all. The songs that capture the public imagination repeat with vengeance, feeding the human mind’s taste for predicability.

If a band chooses, like the Reverie Machine, to eschew this popular device, the onus is upon them to deliver that much more: a mood, lyrics that grab you by the throat, elements that stick with you beyond the initial listen.

And it helps if your vocalist, like Meghan Yates, has a distinctive and powerful voice that can lead a band like any great instrumentalist, teasing out notes and bending songs to her will.

The result is a mix of the National and Norah Jones, or maybe Jolie Holland, rolling waves of rhythm section led by single-note guitar accompanied by artful vocal phrasing. Their debut record, Not By Blood, has been simmering on my iPod for months, finally demanding a full weeks’ worth of listens that have left me wondering why it took me so long to dive in.

They’ve had a slow build in general, grabbing some limelight as part of the last Building of Song in Congress Square ever, back in the summer of 2010, and finally releasing this album in October. They creep up on you, relying not on the hook but on the repetition and cycling of Mordechai Rosenblatt’s electric guitar and thrumming bass, locked in with Elliot Heeschen’s skittering and shuffling percussion.

The album is a dense experience, maybe best personified by “Truman Capote and the Heavy Weight Cloud, Small Town, U.S.A.,” where Yates comes out big in the open, emoting like nobody’s business, with percussive glottal stops, like Death Cab for Cutie two inches from your face.

“We built our world with sticks and shadows,” she sings, and you feel as though, of course, this is a music taken straight from your very marrow, and when the electric guitar solo enters it is spare, broken, esoteric, and hard to grasp. In place of a catchy chorus is a familiarity that makes a chorus extraneous, like the song’s been living inside you for a while and you’re just now recognizing it.

“Owl Skin” is more jazzy, with jittery brushes on the snare and active in the bass, especially. The guitar runs up and down the strings with single notes, jaunty if unsure: “And I could have sworn / That I saw the mark you bore / In the face of the sea / But you weren’t really there.” The head-nodding is near irresistible.

And then you get something as powerful and subtle as “Sometimes,” with Jose Gonzalez classical guitar and a far-off bass like an oncoming storm. When Mark Tipton’s trumpet enters, it’s ensaring, something you can give yourself over to entirely: “I’m just longing for that rock and roll kind of life,” in a way that’s rock and roll in the most philosophical of manners.

You might even mistake it for a jam. “Trendy Love Blues” has a ton of Phish to it, like “Divided Sky” as sung by Billie Holiday. There’s a playful woodblock paired with a moody guitar, and talk of children that haven’t yet come to pass. “Lady of the Sea” reminds of Steely Dan, something that wouldn’t dream of killing your buzz, with a tribal vibe and tambourine to keep them honest. “Little Things” has a military cadence and a bright sustain, with rising pop vocals and a hint of Bobby Darin.

In repeated listens, it can take on a digital feel, even though it’s completely organically created, like Moby meshing those Delta blues recordings with mechanical beats. Yates is of the Earth; her band plays in a hovercraft behind her, a glittering and illuminating background. There are times, as with “Spice,” where there’s an element of Vampire Weekend-style polyrhythms, but the Reverie Machine never get too mechanical or predictable. While songs can cycle and repeat, six-minute songs fly by like wisps, and Yates refuses to let your attention wander.

“And I hope you will join me,” she sings on the closing “Ran Hard,” a gloss on her vocals like blown glass, “I will plan accordingly.” Then a four on the floor enters, about as unobtrusively as that can possibly happen, and the thump turns this into a dance tune, with an ocean of melody in which to swim.

I’m not sure how you could have planned for that.

Steve Grover Quartet: Haiku

Sam

Short and sweet

Steve Grover brings his Quartet back for Haiku

Do the kids still read Jack Kerouac? Is he still a favorite of high school English teachers who want to see which kids have potential?

Let’s hope so. His was an electric intelligence that flowed unpredictably and burrowed into a subject.

Drummer/composer Steve Grover, who does happen to teach at UMaine-Augusta, Bowdoin, Bates, is doing his best to keep his memory alive. He referenced him with two songs on 2011’s Statement, and now calls his latest work, Haiku (his tenth full-length, available at CD Baby and at iTunes), inspired by Kerouac and fellow mid-century poet William Carlos Willams.

Of course, it’s On the Road those high school teachers assign, but Kerouac was a deep examiner of Buddhism and embraced the haiku, writing hundreds in the ‘50s and ‘60s. His and Williams’ “American haikus” expanded upon the natural association of the form, etching thoughts on seasons, the landscape, and the outdoors, but also the human condition and what it all means (there’s some debate about whether they were actually writing senryu, but that doesn’t seem overly important).

Try to forget all that horrible haiku you were forced to write in English class, and the horribly tone deaf uses of the form for humor or faux intellectualism (I’m looking at you, Peter King). And try not to just put this record on and then proceed to do something else. It wants your full attention.

The list of hyperbolic things I’ve written about Steve Grover is already embarrassing, but he deserves all of the accolades, for the pieces he puts together and the musicians he coaxes great things out of.

In this go-round of his clean, classic, bop-styled jazz, he’s got three long-time partners making up his Quartet: bassist Chris Van Voorst Van Beest, who goes as far back as 2000’s Remember right through to Statement; pianist Frank Carlberg, who also was on Remember, and with Van Beest again on Breath, in 2003, plus Blackbird Suite (1997) and Consideration (1999); and tenor saxophonist Andrew Rathbun, who was on Breath, as well. 

They were comfortable together 15 years ago, so it’s no wonder they sound effortless now. One of the more enjoyable aspects of the album is the anticipation of who’s going to be featured on which song and what each player is going to do with that freedom.

Allen Ginsburg went so far as to say in The Paris Review of Kerouac that he was “the only master of the haiku” in the United States (talk about hyperbolic), but it’s certainly true that the form played to Kerouac’s desperate need to boil a subject down to its essence. Similarly, Grover and company are masters of saying much with few notes. The drum break in “Soup” rolls and skips in the snare and toms, but is really all about the nonchalant cymbal work, unpredictable like a flickering fire. “Waning Moon” opens with Rathbun tossing notes into the air only to let them drop with parachutes attached. And Van Beest finishes it with a spare solo that’s sublime in its reserve.

[Editor’s Note: Steve took down the original piece I had embedded from the album, so here’s a tun he still has up, called “Don Won.”]

There are any number of nods to nature and the seasons here, too. The album’s opening tracks, “The River’s Edge” and “The Waters,” are both full of raging rapids, Rathbun firing into “Edge” and hopping from rock to rock in “Waters.” Grover is particularly lyrical in the latter tune, using his sticks on the cymbals to introduce the piece like a Greek chorus and then guide it to a sputtering halt at the finish, the stream never quite making it to the ocean.

And in “Little Birds” Carlberg’s high-up piano work is every bit the delicate and wet sparrow feet of zen poet Shiki, oft-referenced by the beats.

Rathbun’s sax there might be a touch over the top, squawking like a seagull, and the pull back four minutes into “Mist” is more movie-soundtrack than you’d normally hear on a Grover album, but the conversation between Rathbun and Carlberg in “Mist” is like something out of a David Mamet script and Carlberg’s open of “The Delusion of Existence” is Kerouac’s wildflower on the side of a mountain, humble and meditating and maybe just a little bit glum.

Yes, Kerouac was fond of pondering solitary items against the backdrop of wide expanse, and perhaps what Grover does best in his composition is create moments where you can’t imagine anything else going on in the world but that particular instrument being played at that particular time.

Seventeen syllables? That’s more than enough.

(Special thanks in this piece to Penguin’s Book of Haikus, by Jack Kerouac, edited by Regina Weinreich.)