A WEATHER - Everyday Balloons

Albums like this "Everyday Balloons" are the kind that easily fall into the trap of "lacking substance", giving the impression of sliding right off you, dissolving at the first gust of wind. It may well be true that A Weather don't have any genuinely memorable songs up their sleeve, but their music shows a rare ability to capture small "meteorological" shifts and turn them into vivid musical sensations. That's how their soft watercolours take shape, made of gentle, fragrant emotions, to be sipped with the proper acquiescence.

On this new effort, which follows the more sullen "Cove", the American band sounds decidedly springlike, retaining the folk-pop pulse of their previous work ("Winded", "Newfallen", "Fond") while adding an enticing slo-rock touch, replacing a rhythm section that's no longer so bare-bones, as a tool for depth. This new inclination builds steadily over the course of the album (with unexpected peaks like "Seven Blankets", à-la Early Day Miners), emerging more explicitly in the final tracks ("Happiness", "Giant Stairs" and "Lay Me Down").

What lingers most is A Weather's knack for certain melodic surges, small glimpses of light of which the chorus of "Lay Me Down" is one of the finest examples, alongside the romantic duet between Aaron Gerber and Sarah Winchester on "Newfallen" and the irresistible (if perhaps predictable) build of "Third Of Life". It's this quality that makes the Portland band's music so fluid: not because it's free of rough edges, but because it keeps shifting even within its apparent compactness. A vitality that seems anesthetized but turns out to be lively and restless, flashing through the almost-prog jolts of "Fond" and "Happiness".

Then come the sweet ballads of "Midday Moon" and "No Big Hope", echoing what came before. The first takes us to the edge of the ocean, a windswept and oddly poetic piano chanson (it opens with the lines "You once were a dish sponge/ Now you clean tiles/ In the bathroom/ Where sponges go to die"), in which Winchester's solitary vocal is both inspired and enchanting. The dialogue between Aaron and Sarah on the second track revives one of the band's signature moves, a soothing, sprawling lullaby spent watching clouds drift by. The result is a soundtrack for indie infatuations, clumsy papier-mâché figures in stop motion chasing each other through landscapes now gloomily grey, now sun-drenched and in bloom ("Fond").

A big helping hand in how "Everyday Balloons" unfolds comes from the sequencing of the tracks, which closes with two of the album's best songs, the Sigur Rós-like (mostly for its reverberating piano) "Giant Stairs" and the emotional summation of "Lay Me Down". The latter seems to play out like an afternoon of shifting weather, distant thunder, bursts of rain and the sudden appearance of the sun, all blending seamlessly into one another. It's the "weather" the band set out to portray, and they pull it off with undeniable skill.

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21/04/2010