Face value assessments– that’s what we are all about here at 10Listens.  It doesn’t matter that the past may have been better or that some previous band may have been superior.  We cull the present by weeding out the comparisons and lazy pining of the usual reviewer.

That said, it’s really hard for me to listen to Bowerbirds second full-length without thinking of years past.  Seriously, it’s hard.  They represent North Carolina, my home state.  They come from Ticonderoga, one of my favorite bands from my college years and they released one of my favorite songs of the past five years off of their first album (”The Ticonderoga”).  When Upper Air landed in my hands, I had high expectations and high expectations are, most times, the death of a good review.  Basically, I’m asking you to take the following review with a grain of salt.

I don’t like this album very much.  Upper Air feels like a collection rushed ideas looking for homes.  With the exception of “Silver Clouds” and “Northern Lights,” this album is a series of mystical tales, love songs and overtly easy-going animal songs.  In each one, there seems to be something lacking– whether it is instrumentation or lyrical presence-of-mind (the words are often concurrent with an invented mysticism that has little explanation other than oceanic or animal references).

Point of fact, I’d say this album lacks judgment, even.  Take the lyrics on “Teeth.”  “Only through/ the teeth of life/ I see my ancient figure./ My hands are strong./ My eyes are endless./ My mouth is the endless ocean swells and roils with wild invention.”  Now, I am all for extended metaphors, but this conglomeration of myth and metaphor leads to the all-encompassing choral idea of the “teeth of life.”  After the sun and ocean have their turns in the chamber of vagueness, after the pretty vocals and instrumentals sweep over the listener, “through the teeth of life” are seen “brilliant flames/ in the dark time.”  I’m not sure what that means.  Since it sounds pretty, I’m apt to let it pass over me like the roiling ocean or resilient light these lyrics introduced. After spending time with this album, however, I am less apt to wash these songs in the blood of harmony, and more likely to caress their skin with thrashing, grating moonbeams of frustration and apathy (see how this works? Nature is a metaphor).

This is not to say the entire album is bad.  In fact, it’s not terrible at all.  “Upper Air” leaves the listener with the idea of completion, a contemplative set of songs and the desire to love the band.  Not many bands leave me in the position to feel bad about a review, but there is too much positive to not focus on what is neglected.

For instance, “Silver Clouds” is the perfect recovery. The first two songs have the aforementioned metaphor failure and a pair of vocal harmonies that don’t work other than the “male-female” dynamic (am I the only one that finds her voice grating over his smooth drawl?).  “Silver Clouds” stopped me. It made me sit down while I was cleaning off my coffee table just to listen.  It is sparse, for better not worse, and loose.  He leans in and out of the microphone range, waits on the drums and instrumentation to join his jangly guitar chords and allows his story to use a tangible metaphor and straightforward lyrics.

By now, the album is a wash.  I was ready to start over and figure out why this song stood out, but I pressed on.  I was rewarded in spots, but overall, I was still left with the disappointment of contrived natural/supernatural occurrences: moons rising, sand dunes and wild oceans ravaging an otherwise ordinary love affair or more observational myths.  Where the listener wants clarity they get a vague presence of magic and where the listener wants a new idea they get another worn-down phrase.  Therein lies the problem with Bowerbirds.  The prettiness is fine if you aren’t really listening.  You don’t need personality when you are enraptured with simple folk tunes.  That’s what you have here: folksiness.  Easy comparisons.  It’s hard to be upset with easy comparisons.

Even then, the piercing and loving lyrics of “Northern Lights” makes me wish for more of the Red House Painters ethos from this album.  “I don’t expect a Southern girl to get the Northern Lights./ All I want is your eyes in the morning as we wait for a short while.”  Maybe Bowerbirds doesn’t expect some hardened asshole to get why they focus so intently on the power of nature when they could focus on such narrative and descriptive fullness.  They want the simple life and the common associations.  They want the moon, sun and stars, the ocean and the body, the similes and metaphors therein.  That’s fine for them.  I just wanted more, but maybe I wanted more of the same.  The past can only be resolute with the past, I guess.