Brown Bird |
| Bottom of the Sea | Released by Brown Bird | with the Gargoylez and Joshua Marcus | at the Meg Perry Center, in Portland | April 18 | at the Franklin Street Art Space, in Biddeford | April 19 |
This is the second disc in a row I’ve reviewed that opens with an acoustic guitar and a banjo paired, but Brown Bird’s wonderfully haunting Bottom of the Sea shares little else with Roy Davis’s rock-flavored alt-country.Frontman and songwriter David Lamb is like an ancient foundation peeking up through wild grass, deeply rooted but whipped raw by the elements. His voice is world-weary and quietly powerful, a deep and humble timbre that resonates well after a syllable’s end. The words he sings aren’t bad either, filling up concise (often just two minutes long) songs that move from point A to point B, with very rarely a chorus. Fans of Iron & Wine and Red House Painters will find themselves on familiar ground.
Lamb is joined by the Robinsons, Jerusha and Jeremy, and Annie Palmer and Eliza Blue, on various tracks, just often enough to keep the disc from sounding monotone. Sometimes he provides some variation of his own, as with the terrific whistle break on “David and Bethsheba,” which feels pretty autobiographical, the story of a guy who’s knocked up another guy’s gal. Wishful thinking — “If I bring her husband back home, maybe/He’ll go and sleep with her tonight/No one will know that it’s my baby/And everything will be all right” — quickly slows down into reality: “But I’m afraid that he’s already wise/To all the things that I have done.”
If sped up or recanted, a number of these tunes would work great as Irish drinking songs or bluegrass burners (“Amelia Earhart” is a close cousin to Billy Bragg and Wilco’s “Hesitating Beauty”), but in “The Brokedown Palace of My Head,” the song and its namesake both, everything just seems to exist in the pink refracted light of the last sunset you ever saw, where waltzes end with a tear arcing down your cheek and the 1-4-5 song construction was made for soldiers going off to war.
Nothing here is gussied up, a production style that makes lo-fi an understatement. Sometimes you can hear a chair creak, and when Jerusha’s cello builds up through “I Knew You Were Evil” you can just about see her sitting beside Lamb. The album flows like a live performance without the applause, each song separated by a deep breath, which lends an immediacy that’s timeless.
Lamb may insist he’s an everyman — “My heart is valve and ventricle and flesh” — but this Brown Bird truly soars.
