This is earth music. It's the sound one might expect to come echoing from far up on the cracked peak of a mountain or to come rushing quietly but with palpable force across the blades of grass, the sound one might imagine bubbling up from the sand as a small wave washes over it. Rising up from some limpid pool of reverb and youthful awe deep in the woods, Baltimore's Small Sur have presented us with a debut full-length that aims all its emotional force at nothing less than the painting, in broad and sweeping strokes, of a comprehensive portrait of the beauty of nature or, perhaps more accurately, the nature of beauty. By turns stoic, dark, and exuberant, but always sparse and expansive, We Live In Houses Made of Wood strikes remarkably close to its mark.
The instrumentation on the album is characterized by a saturation of reverb and conspicuously scant, yet sturdy and grounded, arrangement. One could easily be forgiven for mistaking pieces of the album for field recordings from some magical eden, as each instrument is handled with such delicacy (with the possible exception of the electric bass, which seems to function as a sort of compelling and restraining foundation for everything else, the tectonic plate motion to the rest of the album's earth). The entirety of the enterprise has a vital honesty about it. Little ditties such as "Ohhhhhh Pt. 2" and "I Love The Sun" sound as if they were born out of pure, excessive joy, as if the songs were being performed for the first time.
Other songs feel as if they were born after days and days of incredibly painful, non-anaesthesized labor. The perfect example of this latter type is the undeniable centerpiece of the album, "Roots." The song is a deep-rumbling meditation, seemingly on the death of singer and multi-instrumentalist Bob Keal's father, that churns around the horizons of our perception like a far-off locomotive for nearly seven minutes. Keal's vocals, which are potent throughout the entire album, are particularly transcendent here, and when he sings "And then we buried him in the corn field/ Oh, oh the roots they hold his soul," the term "haunting" is forever redefined.
These songs are not accessible. Even the simplest, most childlike melodies here echo around within us somewhere we don't often go. The album is not descriptive of the beauty of the world; it's simply content to show us. As if through a glass window at a museum, these songs pull us through the window and out into it. The album says, "You have to see this for yourself." These are nourishing songs, songs that are as close as we city-dwellers can get to the feeling of a strong harvest, songs you have to experience with your bare hands, pulling them out of the ground and shaking the soil off them.
More about: Small Sur
