Listener: Wooden Heart

            Dan Smith (aka the frontman of the “talk music” project Listener) is a surprising success story.  The first time I saw him was at a small café in a small Midwestern town.  I distinctly remember thinking that his music would never catch on.  Three years and almost 40,000 Facebook fans later, I’m delighted to be proven wrong.  After beginning his career in hip-hop, Listener seems to have discovered his true strength in a roots/rock/folk/spoken word medium perfected in his latest album Wooden Heart.

            Literature buffs will be interested to know that Wooden Heart is inspired by The NeverendingStory by Michael Ende.  It’s inspiration may be a fantasy, but the album could not feel more earthy.  Smith’s ability to evoke empathy is at its strongest in “Seatbelt Hands” which tells the story of a person most of us would simply dismiss as a “failure.”  The themes in “You Were a House on Fire” will be familiar to everyone who has struggled to help a hurting friend: “Let’s not talk about the weather/ And whether or not there’s really rain in the clouds/ Unless you want to know if I feel the same as you/ It’s more measuring up than just wasting time/ But time is not on our side, you’re burning/ Rain would only be a temporary fix/ And there’s just no place right now for cute ironies like that anymore.” All of the songs on Wooden Heart are so emotionally heavy  that if would feel overdone, if not for Smith’s sometimes overwhelming sincerity.  The album’s spirit is to deeply rooted in the working class ethos to be postmodernist.  Perhaps the last lines of the last song capture its message best, “Save up your hopes friends/ And send them to the corners of your end/ There is something coming, and everything matters/ Guard your heart, and watch the wind.”

            Listener is much easier to understand when approached as poetry set to music.

Stream the full album on Bandcamp (lyrics included), or watch an Audiotree performance.  

The Soil and the Sun: Wake Up, Child

The Soil and the Sun describes itself as “Experiential Spiritual Folk-Rock meets New Mexican Space Music.”  I’m not entirely sure what that means, but this duo turned 8 piece ensemble seems to live up to it.  A review I read of TSatS criticized the band for failing to create edgy enough pieces.  This misses the point.  The Soil and the Sun is “space music,” and space music is, by definition, not-edgy.  (If you’re looking for edgy try this).  Rather, the group tries (and succeeds) creating broad swathes of sound with their palette of instruments including piano, violin, flute, guitar, cello, accordion, and various percussion.  In their best creations, the dynamics of the songs change seamlessly while carrying the listener through a rich texture of sounds.  “Raised in Glory” (video below) shows this beautifully while the opening track “Spirit of Memory” displays the skillful interplay of their many instruments.

Stream the album on Bandcamp, or watch a full concert in HD on AudioTree.  If you decide space music just isn’t your thing, I hear Carly Rae Jepsen and Owl City have a new single.

Songs of Water: The Sea has Spoken

If I had to put a genre label on Songs of Water, it would be something like “classical/world/Appalachian folk.”  The North Carolinian band’s frontman is multi-instrumentalist Stephen Roach.  Despite being a published poet, his focus in Songs of Water is almost entirely instrumental; him leading the way on hammered dulcimer.  The other six members of the band fill in on instruments including classically-trained violins, acoustic guitar, and heavy wooden percussion. 

This is not singer-songwriter music.  The strongest songs on the record are all wordless.  The first track “Everything that Rises” (a reference to the Flannery O’Connor short story) brilliantly sets the mood for the rest of the album with soaring melodic strings, backed by rippling dulcimer, and punctuated with SoW’s trademark percussion.  Other highlights include the vaguely uneasy “Bread and Circus,” (video below) which slips irresistibly into a waltz about halfway through, and “The Family Tree” with guest Ricky Skaggs.  “Through the Dead Wood” features Roach’s skill as a percussionist—he has been trained in West African and Classical Indian styles.  Hammered dulcimer and violin play off each other the strongest in “Hwyl” which climaxes in a Celtic jig.  Like much instrumental music, Songs of Water is an experience best enjoyed when the listener can give it his or her full attention.

Horse in the Sea

            Horse in the Sea, fronted by Chicagoan Joel Janis, mysteriously disappeared in 2010.  The last update I’ve found of theirs was a simple concert announcement on Facebook dated November 4, 2010 and a song upload on Bandcamp from December 10 of that year.  Nonetheless, the project left behind one excellent album and an equally enjoyable single.  Released in ’08, I Order the Sun to Shine on Everyone is one of the tightest conceptual albums I have heard for some time.  Quite simply, it is a collection of songs about longing, growing up, and hope.  The album feels like part of the natural progression of music we all experience—from the angry, melodramatic exercises in catharsis everyone listened to in junior high through the moody introspective angst of high school, past the hip carpe diem of standard college fare.  I Order the Sun completes the cycle.  It covers themes from wistful reflection on the passage of years in “Mosquito King,” quiet questioning in “Mannequin,” regret in “Annabel,” to the honest admission of weakness in “Shooting Rockets.”  Yet it is the title song that best captures the mood of the album.  “I Order the Sun,” while still having a sense of poignant longing, ends on the note “Soon we’ll see the sun shine down.”

           

All of the songs are carried by Janis’s unique voice which, though laden with emotion, handles its lyrics with a level of distance (almost aloofness) which coupled with the easy dynamics of the music makes the album appropriate for lazy Sunday afternoons and introspective car rides.

            Available for free download at Bandcamp.