HORSE FEATHERS - Thistled Spring

In the succession of seasons charted by Jason Ringle and his Horse Feathers, the winter of "House With No Home" is followed by the spring celebrated on this third album, Thistled Spring, evident right from the burst of buds on the cover art, which replaces the snowy landscape of the previous record.

For the Portland singer-songwriter, the inexorable passing of time represents, on one hand, a factor of continuity, and on the other, one of transformation: in the first sense, "Thistled Spring" retains all the elements of the understated chamber-folk that has deservedly earned him recognition and appreciation in recent years, while in the second, the album sees a significant shake-up in the band's line-up, with siblings Heather and Peter Broderick now replaced by cellist Catherine Odell and two other multi-instrumentalists, Nathan Crockett and Sam Cooper.

Ringle's melancholic imprint and his careful chamber-style polish of a deeply traditional sound remain essential features of a record that nonetheless marks a modest opening-up of his poetics — not quite toward an optimistic spirit, but at least toward a serene contemplation of the inner world, inevitably shaped by the times and contexts of the outer one, and now accordingly warmed by the glow of spring sunlight and colored by a teeming bloom of new life.

Thus, the ten ballads contained in the album seem intent on compressing an entire process of budding and sprouting into the brief span of three or four minutes, observed as if in fast-forward and accompanied by a soundtrack that likewise unfolds from delicate piano miniatures, through dialogues between banjo and strings, before finally opening out into broader chamber arrangements and airy, Botticelli-like crescendos.

If, on a superficial listen, the pattern followed by the tracks might seem a bit too monotone, the thirty-eight minutes of "Thistled Spring" actually reveal the growing assurance of Ringle's performances and, above all, a relentless dynamism of sun-drenched, vital compositions, marked by bucolic flourishes in which the more overtly chamber-music elements gradually overlap with the dusty charm of intimate guitar, banjo and violin sketches.

Despite a natural tendency toward crescendo, the arrangements remain extremely measured throughout, taking on openly romantic contours only in a few passages, and favoring instead moderate experiments built around tempo, tone and atmosphere.

And the result is certainly a success on the level of the songs' outward crafting, an aspect in which Ringle and his bandmates achieve an elegant balance, embodied for instance in the melodic fluidity of "Cascades" or the latent tension built by the cello on "The Drought". The same cannot quite be said, however, of the harmonic and compositional elements: graceful, shy and essential, but ultimately too fragile to truly leave a mark. And yet, even on "Thistled Spring", the renewed Oregon band confirms a personality distinctive enough to carve out a recognizable space among the countless interpreters of acoustic, chamber-infused folk.

And now that spring has arrived to melt away Jason Ringle's endemic melancholy, one can only hope that its full flowering won't require simply waiting passively for the seasons to turn.

In this light, the line that closes the album can only sound encouraging: "At winter's end/ you may come back to life".

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14/06/2010