Folk

Arborea: Fortress of the Sun

Sam

And the horse they rode in on

Arborea erect fortifications of light and darkness

Arborea’s Buck and Shanti Curran asked me if they could listen to the test vinyl pressings of their new album, Fortress of the Sun, at my house. They’d heard the record player for themselves. And they didn’t actually have one, in-house. Well, yeah.

I couldn’t leave well enough alone, though, and tried to rig something up through my folks’ old tube-filled receiver, which turned out to have a shot left channel… Anyway, receiver number three – my trusty Pioneer from college – ended up doing the trick, hooked up to a Technic table.

Good thing. There was something special about watching the care with which they listened. Was that a bent note? Or just a truck tearing by on Route 202? It was the truck. The listening experience stood right up to Ray Lamontagne’s Gossip in the Grain, and he issued that 10-song album as a double disc on 180-gram vinyl, just so the grooves could have some room to breathe.

The record-listening party was a bit of a tease, though, wasn’t it? It’s not like they left me a test copy. Was it different to hear it ripple through my 140+ year-old house, vibrating the still-settling frame for the ultimate analog experience? It sure was. But digital tracks and a good set of headphones works, too.

The listening experience is just so vital to enjoyment of their music. Don’t half ass it. Every note is gently placed, as though each settled on a velvet cushion. That may sound like it could be too precious, but the Currans are fully invested. You can’t imagine disbelief.

Which is probably why, like their metal mirror image Ocean, they are particularly critically acclaimed and have caught highly favorable mentions in the New York Times and Rolling Stone. Their tour stops read like a posh travel magazine’s table of contents. There’s a reason the new album is being released by ESP-Disk’, home to albums by the likes of Sun Ra and Billie Holliday.

However, as of late the mainstream culture has shifted considerably acoustic and may ram right into Arborea if they don’t watch out.

“After the Flood only Love Remains” is stop-in-your-tracks beautiful, and what passes for a single for them. If you can slow yourself down to their pace, see the world in half time for a bit (which is almost impossible when you try to keep up with the pace of things like the Internet), it becomes incredibly catchy, a singalong. Reimagined as a straight up bluegrass song with fiddle and banjo, this would be what they’d call in Maine a “crowd please-ah.” It’s not quite as catchy as “Alligator,” on their most-recent House of Sticks, but it’s also less of an outlier.

Michael Krapovicky provides some electric bass to ground Shanti’s ethereal vocals and Buck’s layers of acoustic guitar and languid electric, which gives it some forward momentum and hints at Neil Young and Crazy Horse. On peyote.

It’s an equine album, indeed. “Pale Horse Phantasm” comes out of the gate like a warm spring wind, Shanti’s barest vibrato in the chorus allowing for the possibility of vulnerability and putting the song right on the fulcrum of narrative and lament. Late song, Buck provides a subtle backing vocal of just a few well placed words. The dynamics in Arborea’s songs are slight adjustments, degrees to the left and right of center, but no less dramatic in their way than emo’s roller coasters.

In “Rider,” Buck takes on lead vocals, with a tasteful acoustic blues riff introducing a gravelly baritone with a lilt, “Hey now rider, do you know why you run?” It calls to mind the iconic “Know You Rider,” with their own version of the cowboy experience, evoking the wide open expanse of the west, the too-bright sun and the wind that bites at the tips of the ears. There is the smell of the horse underneath, its bulk and power, its beating heart.

And then there is “When I Was on Horseback,” an Old English folk song that might have been pulled from the pages of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

Team that with the haunting whispers of “Ghost,” a Shanti solo piece with a banjo that rises from the fog, orderly at first and then losing form and dissipating. Joined by a harmonium, her delivery – with lyrics echoing that kind of faery place that isn’t all flower petals and rainbows at all – might remind you of PJ Harvey’s “little fish, swimming in the water.”

Gearheads might take some pleasure, too, in the fact they help create this timeless aesthetic with the help of an EBow, which bows guitar strings with an energy field (introduced in 1978; first customer was Jerry Garcia; probably last seen locally at the State Theatre as utilized by Built to Spill’s Jim Roth). On “Daughters of Maine,” Buck pairs it with Greg Boardman’s bowed bass and it knifes through the crispness of the fingerstyle acoustic guitar in the kind of solo I’m not sure is ever completely repeatable.

“Cast out your hands” Shanti implores repeatedly into the finish. Her last breath of sibilance at the end is a flash of light.

Cast out your cares and let this album wash over you. Don’t plan on having anything else to do.

Tree By Leaf: Of the Black and Blue

Sam

Melancholy chorus

Tree By Leaf are Of the Black and Blue

My first brush with our reality-television culture came back in 2005, judging a songwriting competition for NEMO (a SXSW wannabe you may or may not remember), which owned the Boston Music Awards, one of which Ray LaMontagne won despite the fact that he’d played roughly five gigs in Boston in his life. Beforehand, in the crowded Starbucks where the songwriting comp was being held, I mostly chatted with the competitors about how it was kind of like American Idol and how we were all basically embarrassed to be involved, but the Phoenix was a sponsor and the winner would take home a Les Paul guitar and move on to compete further in Boston for a chance to go to Hawaii. Who doesn’t want to go to Hawaii on someone else’s dime?

The thing started and Jason Spooner, Emilia Dahlin, Rachel Griffin, and Pete Kilpatrick proceeded to one-up each other with a series of pretty damn impressive performances considering they had three “judges” sitting in front of them (a colleague of mine from WFNX and a NEMO rep were the other two) and they were playing in friggin’ Starbucks (which was fine, actually, but still). Then Garrett Soucy came on the stage. What did he do differently? It’s hard to say. Armed like three of the others with just an acoustic guitar, he didn’t play it like a singer-songwriter. He kind of jabbed at it like an indie rocker, imagining a drummer and bassist to fill in the pauses and quietudes he didn’t mind letting hang in the air. And his songs had choruses, but they were progressive, and their narratives covered serious ground (and time – he was relating a relationship to first Roman times, then the middle ages, then the Renaissance, etc., I’m pretty sure).

*It’s funny how, nine years later here in 2015, Kilpatrick is fundraising for his sixth album now, and Spooner and Dahlin are still doing their thing, while Griffin has found her way down to NYC, where she’s also still performing and writing songs.

Even Soucy’s still plugging away, with a new album in the can, recorded up north where he’s been mostly hiding out for the past half decade.*

But, back in 2005, this is how I originally put it: Soucy might never be the mainstay of the folk circuit Jason Spooner could eventually be, nor the pop star Kilpatrick could be with his charming-pants-off charisma. He won’t be the next Diana Krall, which is a possibility for the aw-shucks Griffin, nor an independent self-made veteran of the college circuit, as is likely for Dahlin. He’s a special talent, though. Sufjan Stevens special; Elliot Smith special. And if half of you never heard of Stevens [seriously, back then he was pretty obscure], and only heard of Smith because he killed himself, that’ll tell you something about being a special talent. It doesn’t always translate into worldwide acclaim. Like many who seem to live inside their work, Soucy’s sure not much for self-promotion.

Maybe that’s why it’s December and I’m just getting around to reviewing the latest release by his band, Tree By Leaf, which came out in May. I’m not sure what other explanation there could be. Of the Black and Blue is spectacular, the type of album that demands you spend time with it and nothing else. The type of album that is all-consuming in and of itself – not background music, not what you put on at a party, not something you should hear on the radio because one song just wouldn’t be enough and they wouldn’t pick the right one anyway.

For his annual GFAC compilation [Volume 6], Charlie Gaylord picked “Never Seems to Leave,” which sure has a certain David Lynchian shuffle to it – one of those songs that’s fast despite the fact that it’s played slowly (or maybe it’s the other way around). Plus, it opens almost perfectly for a Maine compilation: “Trailer park, you’re aglow / You’re a dusted nineteen-sixty-four volume.” Yes, it’s that weird mix of backwoods and frontline intellectualism that Maine seems to revel in. It’s hard to beat, too, Garret’s interplay with wife Sirii, who comes in for the next verse and an ensuing chorus where she sings what’s picked out on the bass so nicely you almost don’t notice, then breathes out the barest backing to Garret’s second verse. Man, it’s good in the headphones. Every once in a while, their voices don’t quite hold up, but it totally works in a Brechtian sense of making you notice the construction of the music itself – this is the way you do this sort of thing, whether you’ve got classically trained voices doing or not it is really irrelevant.

But that’s maybe the fourth best song on the disc. “Rupert Sheldrake’s Favorite Girl” got 15, maybe 20 listens. I love this song in a big way, with Garret’s vocals doubled throughout — really two tracks, not just a chorus pedal or an echo, and they’re just the slightest bit off, both in good ways, with the right channel just the slightest behind, adding an urgency and pushing everything forward. There’s a great guitar break after the first verse, followed by a stellar chorus: “Wait a minute / Hold the phone / I still gotta walk this memory home / I’m in love with Rupert Sheldrake’s favorite girl.” Who’s Sheldrake? God, I hope it’s nobody. Right after the chorus, a really deep organ comes in, sounding like loud stadium applause, very country-rock, as though the Jayhawks decided that instead of rosy-cheeked harmonies they wanted to go the ironic route: “‘That’s funny,’ I said ‘because it’s not about you’ / The sky grew dark, and the wind did blew / ‘That’s weird,’ she said, and handed me a cigarette off the dash.”

At the very end, you can hear the slightest chair creek when Soucy sits back up after letting out the final note. Like much of the rest of the record, you feel you’re privy to something remarkably intimate, created just for you and this time and place.