Halifax Pier - Losing yourself at twilight

These are the peak years of post-rock, when Halifax Pier emerge onto a dense and multifaceted music scene. It's Temporary Residence - at the time a young label, but destined to soon become a major point of reference - that brings this strange and mysterious sextet into the world, since the 1999 release of their debut album came with no information whatsoever about the musicians involved, nor any photos of the band. It would soon emerge, however, that the Halifax Pier project was a sort of open collective, made up of musicians living in different parts of the States, but with a stable core of six members, led by the two guitarists Nathan Salsburg and Charles Sommers, and also including drums, violin and cello.

Perhaps because of the nature of the line-up, or the fact that the album was recorded in Louisville, or perhaps because of the generalized and generalizing climate of post-rock at the time, Halifax Pier's debut is often lumped into that catch-all category, so fashionable back then.

Although certain affinities with the music grouped under that macro-definition cannot be denied (the predominantly instrumental character, the pronounced romanticism, the hazy rhythmic cadences), just as numerous are the elements foreign to it, which distinctively characterize the sound world of Halifax Pier and can be found in their exclusively acoustic approach, in their nods to a spare chamber-folk sound, and in the delicacy of melodies often shaped into full-fledged songs.

All of this comes together, admirably distilled, across the six tracks of their self-titled album, which opens with the simple instrumental "Untitled", six minutes of crystalline acoustic arpeggios and string harmonies, woven into a homogeneous, bucolic whole (barely disturbed by soft, almost absent-minded rhythmic segmentations); it's all too easy, then, to think of Rachel's, Dirty Three, or even an unplugged take on some of the quietest, most circular pieces by Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

However, proof that Halifax Pier's artistic direction is substantially different from that of the bands mentioned above can already be heard in the following track, "Voices From The Front Line", which, introduced by mournful string melodies, unfolds into the dark poetry of a ballad steeped in tales of war and nostalgia. Equally distinctive is the narrative register embodied in the lyrics and performances; the melodic lightness is counterbalanced not only by melancholic, descriptive vignettes, but above all by harsh stories of arcane battles, killings, memories. The same goes for the heartfelt "Strange News From Another Star", with its description of images of death ("⟦Q1⟧", "⟦Q2⟧") and ruins ("⟦Q3⟧"), heightened by Nathan Salsburg's heartfelt, faintly nasal vocals and the moving final seal of the strings.

Lyrics, mood and sonic textures align most closely in "Chance To Leave" and "Halifax Bound", which offer a different take on ties to places and to the past, through narcoleptic melodies and dreamlike cadences, expressed in the extremely delicate duet of the former, redolent of Low and Cocteau Twins, and in the repeated electroacoustic textures stretched out to over eleven minutes in the latter. In these tracks, in fact, it is nostalgia that takes over, together with the awareness of the need for detachment, in order to set a life on a new course ("⟦Q4⟧"). This is where the essence of Halifax Pier's music reveals itself in all its fragile beauty, which thrives on the perfect balance between acoustic folk ballads and the twilight sweetness of acoustic arrangements and sparsely-timed harmonic sketches. All these elements are finally enshrined in the closing "The Old Constellations", with its dynamic crescendos and constant surges of strings, moving from the flourishes accompanying the sung sections to the unrelenting tension of the instrumental coda, a fitting send-off for a record that is precious in its essentialism and, above all, in its constant, always spontaneous and artifice-free, emotional power.

Just two years after their splendid debut, the band's activity seems to be proceeding at a forced pace, on the back of the few but enthusiastic responses garnered by their first album.

Here, then, are six more tracks gathered in another concise work (just thirty-six minutes long), which draws on the same cornerstones as the debut, reworking them with greater attention paid to the crafting of proper songs - songs that gain in fluency what they partly lose in charm.

The biggest fault (so to speak) of Put Your Gloves On And Wave is, paradoxically, simply that of following such a stunning debut, since it is by no means lacking in fresh demonstrations of the band's unchanged class, both in the songwriting and in the arrangements.

Across the three instrumental suites and the three sung tracks that make up the record, one senses a substantial moving-on from the tormented autumnal atmospheres that had made such an impression on its predecessor. The chamber-music flourishes remain, but they become quicker, on the one hand accentuating the band's post-modern neoclassical ensemble character ("That Old Grizzly Thing") and on the other emphasising the rhythm section, now more assertive and closer to the broken cadences typical of many contemporary post-rock outfits ("Sew Your Gloves On"). At the same time, the themes of the songs also become relatively lighter, following an ideal trajectory that runs from the bewildered, contemplative solitude of "Passing" ("Let the silence pass then I move on / this quiet weights heavy with fear") to the joyful lightness of "Lightly Noise" ("Sing a song / we'll sing along / Sing for a long, long time), a track that, not by chance, opens with a cheerful finger-snap and, with its limpid melodies, completes Halifax Pier's transition from a twilight unease to a sprightly, springtime disposition.

Within the newfound positivity that runs, almost imperceptibly, through the album, there is also room for a theme entirely new to Halifax Pier: love. Although the love at the heart of the aching "The Wait" (without a doubt the most intense track on the record) is an unhappy, tormented one, the very recurrence of the subject bears clear witness to the band's renewed poetics, whose heartfelt romanticism blends folk inflections, sparkling string arrangements and sinuous melodies that, thanks also to Salsburg's matured interpretive skills, could in their poppier passages be compared to those of Sodastream, with the added element of rhythm.

The only sonic testimony bearing the Halifax Pier name after Put Your Gloves On And Wave is a track included on the compilation "Thank You!", released in 2004 to celebrate the fiftieth release in the Temporary Residence catalogue. The track, titled "And California", is a simple ballad running just over four minutes which, initially centred solely on voice and guitar, then opens up with the entrance of the excellent Jamie Reeder's violin - as touching as ever, though by now relegated to an accessory role within a song of increasingly defined folk hues.

There will, however, be no way of confirming or denying this possible artistic trajectory for the band, at least not under this name and in this form: the brief and singular experience of Halifax Pier comes to an end with this last track, but its legacy will live on in many later bands of (lato sensu) orchestral folk and, in part, in the new forms taken on by some of its members, who returned to cultivating old and new projects in their respective hometowns. In particular, bassist Greg Burns would join post-rockers Red Sparowes, while decidedly more in keeping with Halifax Pier's composite spirit were the two guitarists and singers Nathan Salsburg and Charles Sommer: the former heading more decisively towards acoustic folk, on a mini-album released for the "Travels In Constants" series under the alias At Right Angles, the latter with the songwriterly delicacy of deep America found in the more recent duo The Cannery (formed together with Roger Riedlbauer), which stands as a credible and coherent continuation of the path of a band that would surely have deserved a longer run and far greater recognition than it has generally received so far.

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