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.