"Haunting", "ethereal", and "oozing with soul" are just a few of the words used to describe the music of these Alabama-Kentucky-to-Northern California transplants. Backed by a crack ensemble, this duo's transcendent brand of super-spooky, carefully crafted music for many moods is the genre-blurring experience of the decade. "Brightblack's free form blues sound transcends marketing, name-dropping, and hustling, taking us for a blindfolded dive into a live river. When you close your eyes, separating yourself from your immediate surroundings, and hear Rabob's (Rachael's) moody keys and experience the slow syrup rhythms of Nabob's (Nathan's) 'Bear Momma' slide guitar, you find yourself lost in an unpretentious, unmaterialistic world" - Soma.
Brightblack Morning Light
Brightblack Morning Light
[Matador; 2006]
Rating: 8.2
Despite sylvan genuflections and hippy naturalism, the shaggy Alabama-born, Northern California-based core of Brightblack Morning Light are surprisingly redolent of Royal Trux. It's partially the Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema thrift style, tight "best friend" relationship, and the harmonizing between guitar-toting Nathan "Nabob" Shineywater and Rhodes-massaging Rachel "Rabob" Hughes. But also take stock of the slow-mo blues, languid guitarscapes, and druggy atmospherics: Instead of smack, it's peyote, and a scrubby squat's been replaced by a tent beneath the stars. The obvious non-Trux dealbreaker? Brightblack supports sundry environmental causes, including Friends of the Eel. Nope, can't imagine Twin Infinitives' ma and pa getting too into that.
The comparison's stretched so I can make a point: Despite the Quiet Quiet Ocean Spell festivals Brightblack curates and the Joanna Newsom and Devendra entries in their hand-sewn address book, the troupe's doing something very different than what's been shoved under the "freak folk" family tree. As in many cases, it's pretty obvious they're linked due to hair length and back story-- the ho-hum tangentials. Textually, Shineywater and Hughes' hobo dispatches border on farce. For instance, a letter accompanying the press release notes: "Our mixed blood holds some American Indian somewhere, but we have no reservation to live." When I was a kid, my father signed me up for this group called Indian Guides, which featured suburban fathers and sons pretending to go back to nature on the weekends. I haven't traced their blood lines, but somehow that sorta faux-poetic hokum stinks of that same "going-native" vibe. The lyrics feature some pretty images, but are basically tossed off variations on rainbows, rain, crystals, smoke, and rivers.
Thankfully, on Brightblack Morning Light's excellent second full-length, their first for Matador, it hardly matters what the band's saying. (There's a reason Slint invited them to play at All Tomorrow's Parties and Rachel Grimes of the Rachel's helps them out.) Prior to this collection, they released the Paul Oldham-produced 2004 debut, Ala.Cali.Tucky and a 2002 split 7" with Bonnie Prince Billy as Rainywood, none of which could have prepared us for the absolute depth of sound smeared across these 10 tracks. It's all fleshed-out gorgeously by a cast of characters that includes Gojogo percussionist Elias Reitz, White Magic's Andy Macleod, ex-Zwan and A Perfect Circle bassist Paz Lenchantin (also a touring member for post-Royal Trux crew, RTX-- see, my musings aren't so hair-brained), and magical vocal harmonizers Gail West and Ann McCrary, among others. The most spectacular ingredients? R&B style flute, trombone, and clarinet. Big ups there.
The pine-cone orchestra's recorded wonderfully by Thom Monahan, the ex-Monsterland rocker and Pernice Brother who also turned knobs for Cripple Crow. And like on certain albums by pre-Kinks Lilys or My Bloody Valentine, a single level's maintained for the duration. The word "Hypnotic"'s overused, but the band's spatial know-how and rigorously muted flourishes are more than deserving of the accolade. It's well-deep, blossoming ambiance. The repetitions feel like minimalism, but it unfurls like the sleepiest loner psych.
With swirling Rhodes and wind-wraith vocals, opener "Everybody Daylight" is half-frozen rock that catches heat with a warm rhythm-and-blues ground cover. Percussion is a major ingredient of each track. Here, conga, acorn glave, and dry-wall trap kit are embellished with flute and gemstone guitars. These campfire songs will make you contort your face like Mick Jagger and nod your head in slow motion. The sound's so bottomless, when a flute starts up, it sounds like it's echoing from 12 trees deep into a grotto.
Those exquisite repetitions curl into "Friend of Time", which feels like a harvest moon, seed capsules, and gourds shaking out textural beats. Cymbals catch air like a waterfall and a trombone moves over the looping, lapping backdrop and the male/female vocals. The brief, more upbeat instrumental "Fry Bread" shifts the pace a tad, before opening up to the most shimmering evidence of the band's compositional brilliance, the 10-minute "Star Blanket River Child". Hashier vocals and louder percussion stamp "Black Feather Wishes Rise"; "A River Could Be Loved", dedicated to those eel folks, showcases a stripped-down, piano-driven, guitar-free sound.
The first few weeks I listened to Brightblack Morning Light, I was working on a longish project: It nestled into the background like one perfect, melancholic deep-woods quilt. Listening more closely, the lullabies keep showing new angles while getting livelier and livelier. That sort of compositional ruggedness is a treat: Brightblack Morning Light offers a clear-cut differentiation between run-of-the-mill indie-rock bar bands hiding out in folksy wardrobes and those doing something nuanced and complex. Hell, not even a song called "We Share Our Blanket With the Owl" could fuck up this shape-shifting slumber party.
-Brandon Stosuy, June 23, 2006
Review by Marisa Brown
Perhaps the glasses that accompany Brightblack Morning Light's self-titled album say enough about the record itself. They're of thin paper, with a rainbow, three marijuana plants, and the phrase "resisting Babylon system one rainbow at a time" drawn on the face. To aid in achieving this stated goal, putting on the glasses blurs the wearer's vision and not only makes rainbows appear but all capitalist yearning for mindless consumption vanish. Ostensibly, wearing these glasses while listening to Brightblack Morning Light's music will transport listeners to places in which nature takes priority, where things are peaceful, where hours can be spent by the river watching the flow of the water and contemplating the simplicities of life. Whether all of this actually happens, however, is fairly debatable. Not that the efforts by founding bandmembers Nathan "Nabob" Shineywater and Rachael "Rabob" Hughes aren't sincere (they live in tents during the warmer months of the year and a communal cabin when it's colder), but their apparent desire to break out of stereotypes is so strong that it almost seems contrived. Why the glasses? Shouldn't the music itself be sufficient? But perhaps all of this superfluity must happen because the band realizes that the actual record just isn't quite strong enough to bring its listeners to any kind of higher plane of understanding. It's not bad, it's just not as profound as Shineywater and Hughes would like everyone to believe it is. It's slow, languid music, music that wants to be sung by the Spanish moss that hangs in the duo's home state of Alabama, but stays stuck in the swamps instead. It's all very nice; it just doesn't ever do anything, say anything, mean anything. The Fender Rhodes starts a simple groove, the guitar joins in, the hi-hat begins tapping out triplets, and then Shineywater's nearly unintelligible vocals pour in, echoing against Hughes' own voice and the bass, but it goes nowhere, does nothing. The lyrics meander around abstract ideas of oneness with nature that aren't particularly profound ("With Silver Cloud came a Rainfall, with Rain made a River come all for you"), the instruments continue repeating the same phrases, and everything is poignant in that way that a prism refracting sunlight around a room is: not very, but pretty nonetheless. Brightblack Morning Light may have been able to successfully extricate themselves from the grips of urban existence, but it's doubtful that their music will do the same for anyone else.
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