BIRDSONG AT MORNING - Signs And Wonders

“Listening to ‘Annals Of My Glass House’ is like walking into an old antique shop full of little fragments and dusty books, a place where time passes slowly and which you leave carrying with you not an object, but its history”.

It's strange how these words, written on the occasion of the first effort by Birdsong At Morning, haven't lost their meaning at all, remaining just as relevant today, perfectly capturing in a few lines the essence of the trio from Lowell, Massachusetts (birthplace of Jack Kerouac).

A fair amount of time has indeed gone by since that refined and daring album, split across 4 mini-CDs, which, between a series of seemingly bizarre covers and a handful of finely crafted originals, attempted to write a new chapter in the world of sophisticated-pop.

With the following “A Slight Departure”, the American trio restored to the term easy-listening all the dignity it had lost through years and years of ruthless industrialization; it's no coincidence that the band's leader stated in a recent interview how much terms like songwriting, arrangement, sound quality and artistic integrity still matter to Birdsong At Morning.

This time the band brought in a 20-piece orchestra, entrusted the mastering to the multi-award-winning Adam Ayan (a staggering 42 Grammy Awards), and for the blu-ray edition enlisted the very same people behind the reissues of King Crimson, Yes and Xtc (Neil Wilkes and Steve Bell).

While staying true to its folk-pop nature, "Signs And Wonders" digs even deeper into those prog-rock leanings that had already surfaced in the excellent cover versions of songs by King Crimson and Rolling Stones.

This time it's Supertramp who get the skillful acoustic-orchestral reinterpretation treatment: the famous "The Logical Song" is not only simply retitled "Logical", but sheds its pop connotations to become a slow, hypnotic folk ballad, graced by a fine vocal performance from Alan Williams, while the refined instrumental coda pushes the track well beyond the boundaries of chamber-pop.

The toughest challenge for the band was not getting swept away by the excesses of the orchestral arrangements, and despite a few minor missteps ("Smiles Of A Summer Night", "Arms Around Me"), the album holds up well even on its more dynamic, lively tracks ("Waterfall", "Won't Let Go").

The interplay between the elegance of the Wondrous Signifiers' twenty-piece ensemble and the more delicate, crepuscular ballads comes off more smoothly, above all on the magical "All Sadness To Come", which dusts off one of the band's idols, Nick Drake, whose ghost also lingers in the folds of "My Ghost", while "Extraordinary" returns to those sonic depths that Blue Nile bequeathed to anyone skilled at capturing, with spare, deeply romantic tones, the allure of night and the melancholy of solitude.

Once again Birdsong At Morning don't disappoint, and between an instrumental fingerpicking piece ("Kehena Shuffle") and a couple of songs tailor-made to grab the attention of a more mainstream audience ("Study In Blue" and the title track), they deliver another lesson in class and refinement to those musicians who have sold out the art of perfect-pop to the temptations of aesthetics and mediocrity.

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27/10/2018