BROWN BIRD - Salt For Salt

He has the shaggy face of an old-time pioneer, she has the sharp eyes of a woodland dryad. Brown Bird are a duo from Providence, Rhode Island. Born as a solo project for songwriter David Lamb and grown over the years into a full-fledged band, it's in this two-piece dimension that they finally seem to have found their essence: a pulsating bond between Lamb's dark timbre and MorganEve Swain's deep countermelodies, able to merge the sense of inevitability of American gothic with the gypsy-paced folk of labelmates Vandaveer and Dark Dark Dark. “Salt For Salt” is their most solid record: songs that plunge into the dark waters of tradition, charged with the unease of an eternal struggle between the gods of anguish and those of love.

Rarely in recent years has the West appeared to us as vividly as it does here. The harshness of its winter (“End Of Days”), which tightens its bony fingers around the last hearth before the end of days; a desolate past, indistinguishable from present and future, in which inhospitable, merciless Nature slowly reclaims dominion over a planet abandoned by God (“Nothing Left”). An inner West, desertified and violent (“Blood Of Angels”), portrayed not with the fatalistic primitivism of a Meiburg (Shearwater) or the spectral rarefaction of a Tiny Vipers or Talons’, but with the tempered eye of an age of utter solitude facing the unexplored, where human endeavor is an island of warmth, an imperceptible yet towering presence upon the landscape.

It don’t matter if the cold wind blows

from “Bilgewater”

David Lamb's acoustic guitar intertwines with MorganEve Swain's fiddle, cello and double bass; David then adds a percussive contribution that blends perfectly with the duo's earthy, wandering sound. A lineup and a sound, in fact, not unlike that of bands such as Breathe Owl Breathe, compared to whom the distinctly traditional content of this "Salt For Salt" is incomparably more pronounced (just listen to "Cast No Shadow"), with roots ranging from pre-war blues (the lovely "Fingers To The Bone") to bluegrass.

Compared to contemporary works in the same vein (Anais Mitchell's "Hadestown" above all), Brown Bird have the rare merit of avoiding theatricality, not to say caricature, while also steering clear of excessive adherence to traditional conventions. God forbid you call them folk: "someone might then expect to hear Joan Baez," David and MorganEve joke. The truth is that theirs is a visceral relationship with their roots, with little inclination toward mere devotion to the past.

Light and darkness, good and evil. In the end, that's what every day's struggle comes down to. One can choose to take refuge in darkness, Lamb sings over the surging drive of "Blood Of Angels". One can choose to turn one's back on the sun as though it were a broken promise. But one cannot help defying the darkness of the sky, waiting for a bolt of lightning to tear through the night and separate the guilty from the innocent. One cannot help searching for the road home, for that place which, at the end of the day, might give meaning even to the sacrifice that seems to consume one's existence in "Fingers To The Bone": "Just a little bit if rest before the day that I die". David Lamb carries the mark of that longing etched on his own skin, tattooed letter by letter across his fingers: "Come home".

I lift my voice to the forces above

(da “Fingers To The Bone”).

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

15/11/2011