"love is not what you thought, pine away just like Faust, but you didn’t know what it cost, and you didn’t count on a loss"
The anger, loss and reflection coursing through "Hacksilver" by Wickerbird, the exquisitely moody dream folk project of Black Cowan, begins with scattered distant TV news reports eluding to the turning back of Roe VS Wade and the ratcheting turn to the right (a demure way of describing fascism). With the seriousness of those transmissions in your head you are taken by your hand and lead into a misty soundscape. The mist is built on acoustic guitar and swelling drones of orchestrated sounds and percussion so lost in that fog that, at first, you might not be able to recognize the depth of it all. The vocal aesthetic like a chorale deep in a dense forest is gorgeous cast in an ethereal haze. The sensation is somber, the overall sound like angels or ghosts in the dark.
The lyrics begin with these words:
"go throw away your clothes / they’re not worth saving, you know / go through the pockets before, / though there won’t be much need anymore / for whatever they still store / and- hide your face in the cloth, / love is not as you thought hide your frame in your laws, / you do not know what it costs, /
and you didn’t account for the loss..."
and you didn’t account for the loss..."
The thick psychedelia, the utter shoegaze approach doesn't lessen the heaviness of the melancholia and the longer you listen, you start to gather your footing, latching onto the the piano and vocal melodies in tandem. I start to imagine that the collective dreams of Kevin Shields, Colm Ó Cíosóig, and Bilinda Butcher (My Bloody Valentine) might resemble what Wickerbird conjures up.
"Hacksilver" is from Wickerbird's full length "The Sea Weaver". I would suggest you delve in via the Bandcamp link to be able to capture Cowan's compelling lyrics fully. The Official Video for "Hacksilver" (Official Video) is also compelling shot across wild foothills of Washington state and while I will not give it away here I find the press notey stuff about it interesting:
"The video is a lo-fi, found-footage attempt to visualize change not in it's constructive ability to incite growth, but instead as a destructive force, in its capacity for deterioration and loss. It poses self-destruction as an inherent facet of environmental destruction."
-Robb Donker Curtius
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM - PRESS NOTES:
https://soundcloud.com/wickerbird
https://twitter.com/Wickerbird
https://open.spotify.com/artist/5JnB0pjUaCDOuRKRzuS5ti
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsxMZtYzrQ4Hs3QliLUIp6A
https://wickerbird.bandcamp.com/
https://www.instagram.com/blakcow/
Wickerbird is the atmospheric dream-folk project of Blake Cowan, started in the wild foothills of Mt. Rainier. It began as a means of relating the understanding he found wandering the woods, told in distilled daydreams and wrought within the distant strands of tranquil, wistful guitars and cavernous, haunting harmonies.
His prior work includes The Crow Mother (2012), The Westering (2013) and The Leaf Maker (2015) — collections of music that are steeped in allegories of disillusionment and transition, casting personal insights under layers of natural metaphor and mythical imagery.
Where this past work concerned itself with forest-bound introspection, examining the forces of change in their capacity for growth, Wickerbird’s upcoming full-length record The Sea Weaver shifts its perspective outwards to the horizon, reckoning instead with the destructive aspects of change.
While his vantage remains lodged in those same diminishing natural spaces, The Sea Weaver instead explores his relation to the rapidly unraveling human context that envelops him and in doing so, contends with a haunted acceptance of being bound to its fate. It is a collection of threadbare elegies for the end, as overheard through the walls of a crumbling house.
With gauzy, liminal atmospheres, stark finger-picked melodies, reverberant choirs, and mythologized natural imagery, Wickerbird makes an accounting of what emotions remain – when the anger and fear of a stolen future have long burnt off.”
No comments:
Post a Comment