Shearwater

Shearwater: “Rooks”

from Rook (Matador)

horizoned out, in  // Out June 3

(orig. pub. late May or earliest June 2008)               

In a song called “Homelife, “ someone is reminded of being a little girl, “…Tracing the lines of a globe with your fingers: cool rivers, white wastes, desert shores, the forest green, and a limitless life in the breath of each tide, and each bright mountain rising. But now the boys are away, and such kicks they are having, slashing away at the forest walls, with their bitter bright knives, sparks bloom in their eyes, and they never look tired, will they never look tired…” Got it? Girls: good! Nature: good! Boys: eeeeuuuuh! And the singer, though male, is trilling away; he’s Mr. Sensitive. But then he asks her if she also remembers her mother’s initially soothing words-- and the music (which can, on Shearwater’s Rook, include piano, electric and acoustic guitar, drums, vibraphone, glockenspiel, Hammond organ, pump organ, hammered dulcimer, lap steel guitar, harp,upright and electric bass; not to mention the strings, brass and woodwinds, deftly arranged by Mark Sonnabaum), the music, as usual, knows when to part the waters and make an intimate space. Where Mother’s words have room to grow (as even the singer calms down): “Though this water is wide, you will never grow tired, you are bound to your life like a mother and child, you will cling to your life like a suckering vine, and like the rest of our kind, you will increase and increase past all of our dreaming.” The song grows, swells right past, or at least around its original good/bad polarities—in a monstrous way, I’d say, or at least a spooky one, you’d have to agree. Like a cancer, a virgin, urban sprawl, anything else in nature: it’s alive, so look out y’all!

Thus, on Rook, Shearwater (named for a very wide-ranging migratory seabird, which some swear lives its whole life in the air), gives us an aerial view of a world with its own poles (of man and nature, good and bad, etc.), but it’s also a cracked little vessel of melting absolutes, fluid identities, recurring themes and infectious images. There’s a shared sense of surging desperation in humans and other critters; vitality that doesn’t know what to do with itself or its prey, past a certain point, which seems to have been some time back. Of course, in the vast indifference, you must invent a meaning---and that’s Shearwater for you, spiraling back through (and building on) higher-minded/older thoughts, which also include invocations of the Life Force, the sublime, upper-case Romanticism, and “Leviathan, Unbound”(no lie, that’s the actual title of track three). Plus: a whole lotta moonlight, waves, even a balcony—all brought to us via the pear-shaped tones and vibrating vowels of Mr. Jonathan Melburg. Such are the risky results of an aerial view, which can seem distanced (nay, framed!) in time as well as space.

But arty art can work: the camera-bird’s got a zoom lens, and knows when to swoop and hover among us. When gravity’s got him, Melburg can yell, whoop, or be sneakily unobtrusive, as in the last part of “Home Life.” (Doesn’t happen that often, but it happens; usually, it’s the instruments that really put the songs across.) And, while this isn’t just a “green” record, in the usual sense, some recycled point of no return is throbbing pretty hard in “Rooks.” Rooks are crows; they like to scavenge (they’re also those canny little castles on the chessboard, and to “rook” is to swindle). But here, they’re just dead, piled up and burning. Birds of other feathers are dying too, and the narrator is ready to stay inside, to sleep hard. Yet a falconer wakes up--and, while “each empty cage just rings in his heart like a bell,” he (like the hunters who appear in other songs, like the blood-high”Lost Boys,” who come after that little “Home Life” girl, and the girl herself, “suckering vine” and all), he hears a vanishing song, and how the rest of it should go. (Something like this, although “Rooks” is a little tame, compared to what Rook can more typically do).