Heron Oblivion, Heron Oblivion, Sub Pop
Sometimes music finds its essential strength from the containment of two opposite forces within it. But a band needs discipline and concentration to pull that off.
Heron Oblivion, a quartet from the San Francisco Bay Area, seems to have it. This is a rock band with interests pointing pretty clearly toward the inward-focused music of the late 1960s and 1970s, loud and soft, ecstatic and hermetic. What’s the value in treading that ground again? It’s in how the band does it. The group’s self-titled first album is meditatively folky and gluttonously, strobingly psychedelic: There’s your first set of opposites.
The gluttony comes out mostly through the two guitarists, Noel Harmonson and Charlie Saufley, playing through distortion and wah-wah pedals, alternating between soloist-and-accompaniment relationship and mutually assured destruction. But if you’re tuning into the singer Meg Baird, who sometimes evokes Sandy Denny of Fairport Convention and sings lyrics about love and the natural world — images of sand, leaves, sea, sky — you’re hearing a different record: Her voice is strong and directed and clean.
And then there’s the drumming, in a groove with the bassist Ethan Miller. It’s an almost stoic presence: slower than it needs to be, evenhanded, sometimes determinedly hanging back from the rest of the band. You’ll look at the credits: Who would do that? It’s Baird, in a double role. It’s a sandwich, this record. Her discipline frames the music at the top and bottom. The gnarly overspill fills the middle.
A Heron Oblivion moment — there’s a powerful one in nearly every track, so a representative one — comes about two-thirds through a track called Rama, with a crawling tempo and huge dynamic shifts. By this point, there’s been two ecstatic choruses amid restful verses, and one wild, expressive, Neil Young-like guitar solo. The song dwindles down for about 25 seconds, or eight bars, of Baird’s slow, quiet rhythm alone, played on bass drum and snare. It’s a long enough stretch to signal that something new is coming, something opposite and something big; it will have to be big enough to redeem that ominous lead-in. It does, and it is.
— Ben Ratliff
When You Walk a Long Distance You Are Tired, Mothers, Grand Jury Music
Kristine Leschper, the singer and songwriter from Athens, Georgia, who leads Mothers, has a plaintive, slender voice that quavers and slides around her melodies. It’s a small, defenseless sound, but there’s not a hint of timidity in it — not when she’s singing lyrics like “I woke up feeling mutilated” or “I said that I could be just what you wanted/ as if I could ever keep a promise,” or, most tellingly, “Make me an offer/ I want to show you everything.”
What she shows on Mothers’ debut album, When You Walk a Long Distance You Are Tired, is startling. Leschper writes, in shards and epiphanies, about toxic psychologies: self-hatred, destructive relationships, power struggles, betrayals. She doesn’t spare herself or those she’s with. “Became something/ bloated with doubt/ bullied by love,” she sings in Too Small for Eyes, the album’s opening song. It’s a waltz that leaves her deliberately exposed; most of it is accompanied only by her own “spindy” plucking on a mandolin, joined occasionally by a modest string arrangement.
Mothers started out as Leschper’s solo recordings and solidified into a four-piece band, which has arrived amid a wavelet of starkly honest music by women like Julien Baker, Soak and Waxahatchee. Much of the Mothers album harks back to the transparency and austerity of early punk and indie rock, particularly the two-guitar interweave and conspiratorial, explosive buildups of Television; many of the songs run longer than five minutes, guitars grappling all the way. For contrast, there are other songs that barely use drums and enfold electric guitar with strings: chamber-pop tracks like Nesting Behavior and Burden of Proof that move slowly and tensely, like bitter lullabies.
Throughout the album, the lyrics don’t find comfort or resolution. That’s left to the music: in the way the guitars tangle and persevere, in the grace of the melodies, and in the simple fact that Leschper dared to write these songs. The album’s summation, and perhaps the band’s path forward, is the seven-minute Hold Your Own Hand, another indictment. It starts with a lone guitar picking slow arpeggios, speeds up as the band gradually joins in and finally allows itself the relative luxury of multiple layers of vocals and guitars, revving up to a swirling, shimmering waltz — a brief stretch of instrumental euphoria despite every misgiving.
— Jon Pareles
Emily’s D+Evolution, Esperanza Spalding, Concord
Whimsy gets weaponized on Esperanza Spalding’s new album, Emily’s D+Evolution. Spalding, hailed during the last decade as a springy jazz bassist and an irrepressible vocalist, has hardened her singer-songwriter ambitions and tightened her grip as a bandleader. The album — a sustained burst of funk enlightenment that rings with echoes of childhood — has its blind spots, but she sounds surer than ever of her footing.
There’s a bolt of reinvention in these songs, which Spalding unveiled on tour last year, leading a band driven by electric bass and guitar. Funk the Fear, a syncopated yawp of defiance, represents the far end of this shift from lissome chamber-jazz to a muscular hybrid steeped in mid-1970s R&B, prog-rock and fusion (and, skipping ahead a bit, vintage Prince).
Is there a concept here? Why yes, of course: Emily’s D+Evolution combines Spalding’s middle name, by which she was known as a child, with an awkward nod to regression. Onstage, she and her band perform the songs with theatrical staging, as if to highlight a spirit of playful artifice. You don’t need to know more than that, though the premise explains why the sole cover here is I Want It Now, a tantrum in waltz time that appeared in the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. (It’s Veruca Salt’s unwitting swan song, and implicitly a sharp critique.)
Spalding has a fondness for tripping syllabics and a strong moralist streak: Her songs often turn outward rather than within, which can make her seem a figure of reproving judgment. (Again, Prince is relevant here.) But her musical insights are so lofty, and their execution so grounded, that most of these tracks are winners: surely Unconditional Love, a soulful entreaty, and One, which flirts with dubstep in the chorus and Joni Mitchell in the verses.
It’s hardly the only Joni-flection: Noble Nobles and Earth to Heaven have the complex harmony and coltish melodic phrasing of songs from Mitchell’s mid-to-late-’70s albums. Those albums featured Mitchell’s magical rapport with bassist Jaco Pastorius, and Spalding plays a fretless electric bass in a style indebted to his, making her both the Joni and the Jaco in this equation — a considerable feat.
Against the contemporary landscape, who else is in Spalding’s lane? She isn’t a sensualist shape-shifter like FKA twigs or a subversive formalist like St Vincent. “Don’t march up in your discerning shoes,” she admonishes in Good Lava, but she still favors too many Wayne Shorterish chord progressions to truly suit the easily impressed. It’s precisely when she stretches — as on Rest in Pleasure, which has a melody you wouldn’t wish on a less acrobatic singer — that Spalding seems most ingenuous and unbound.
— Nate Chinen
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