Album Review: Brightblack Morning Light – Motion to Rejoin
The third album from the duo (and rotating cast of instrumentalists) known as Brightblack Morning Light is their most accomplished yet. The dulcet tones that comprise their prevailing sound have never been as good as on Motion to Rejoin.
The album title indicates something of a return, but to what is unclear. The duo have not retreated to the city (they live in a solar paneled hut in Middle-Of-Nowhere New Mexico) and their laid back sound hasn’t taken on any of the characteristics of their more indie based freak folk contemporaries.
MP3: Brightblack Morning Light – “Oppressions Each”
Motion to Rejoin is an album characterized by their resistance to any BPM over about 100. Every track is a beautiful ballad that sits on it’s haunches watching the movements take place. The album is so slow yet manages to be entirely engaging throughout, Brightblack have an uncanny ability to make their unique brand of tortoise paced folk work.
They often devolve into a parody of themselves hanging a little too heavily on nature imagery. Mentions of buffalo, eagles, tee-pees, rainbows and sunsets abound, but they fall away as quickly as they appear. There are many who will find Motion to Rejoin the perfect opportunity to seed the latest stoner joke they heard down at the bar, while there are just as many who will sit for an hour agog in front of their speakers.
There is a tendency to characterize Naybob Shineywater and Rachael Hughes sound’s as relentlessly atmospheric, hippy mood music, an exercise in redundant simplicity, but that neglects the complex structures lodged within these seemingly simple melodies. The songs take on movements over ABC structures, the atmospheres shift in place, instruments glide in and out of the movements like, well, like eagles, the album hovers and crashes at the speed of my mother’s driving. Throughout their three LPs this slow pace has been the standard, relentlessly standard. But not in the same fashion that a band like Sigur Ros utilizes pacing, where they introduce a dynamic element to their songwriting and introduce signature changes at will Brightblack holds fast. Brightblack makes a band like Sigur Ros feel a little hasty. Yet, this pacing seems natural in their hands, this is the pace of dissection, the pace of the mentality that these orchestrations derive from.
From the Steve Reich influenced “A Rainbow Aims” to the beautifully lush “Oppressions Each” Brightblack have found their voice. The dissonant harmonies with simple vocal melodies, echoing succinct leitmotifs woven into the fragile fabric of their minimalist landscapes come together to create a rapturously simple album that has hidden depths like few releases this year.
