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Brown Bird |
Brown Bird have never sounded as fully realized as they do on Such Unrest. The noirish Americana trio — Portland cellist/vocalist Jerusha Robinson and all-purpose instrumentalist Jeremy Robinson, fronted by Boston songwriter/guitarist David Lamb — specialize in tales of romance shrouded in paranoia and often doom. Lamb’s explicit yearnings are woven into dark folk arrangements, and the band’s careful but expanding compositions elevate what ought to be a fearful downer into something more mysterious and beautiful.The immediacy of Lamb’s lyrics is apparent from the start. His romances are double-edged swords, implicating both parties’ fatality in well-rounded metaphors.
Album opener “My Mind is an Altar” utilizes his delivery — clear and soulful, with a faint and necessary bit of gravel — to make an ambiguous indictment: “My mind is an altar/where thoughts come to burn/As offerings to heaven/and one day you’ll gather the ash in my urn/You will have feathers and you’ll see everything from above.”
Such Unrest succeeds even in its more funereal stretches, in no small part because of some graceful Balkan inflections. The title track begins with a chill — “With such unrest/What peace can come” — but tambourine and kickdrum enter and give voice to the rising fears; the song turns into an old-world waltz, and the best use of the trio’s aching three-part harmonies. “Blue is the Weather” and “Run the Wire” follow as the album’s sweetest moments, soothing Iron & Wine-like banjo licks loaning simple warmth to Lamb’s intimate lyrics as he tries to shrug off “his inconstant ways.”
It’s Lamb’s cohesive songwriting and charismatic vocals that carry Such Unrest, but it’s his partners’ fluid expansion into a denser and more complex backdrop that makes the album special. The Robinsons’ sly touches of quiet menace — the interplay of accordion and cello on “Burden,” the background refrain of “Everything I touch turns to gold” on “Gold” — bring Lamb’s vivid imagery to fruition.
_CG
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