AEM045 Evening Hymns

We tend to think of sad, acoustic gui­tar anchored music as being inti­mate (I don’t want to call it ‘folk’ because folk is already another kind of music. You know, like The Carter Fam­ily singing “John Hardy”). It’s a music of deeply per­sonal songs whis­pered in bed­rooms and as such it has the effect of feel­ing like a direct com­mu­ni­ca­tion between us and a softly croon­ing bearded guy. It’s a kind of music that can really only exist per­fectly on record, as softly croon­ing into a micro­phone in front of 600 peo­ple all cran­ing their necks to get a glimpse of the artist’s sen­si­ble cloth­ing doesn’t have quite the same effect. Recently, though, there seems to have emerged an inter­est in tak­ing the small, cramped spaces of con­fes­sional music and crack­ing them wide open with­out sac­ri­fic­ing the per­sonal con­tent and direct­ness that made the orig­i­nal style so appealing.

Phil Elverum’s songs as The Micro­phones and Mt. Eerie are so lyri­cally inti­mate they can some­times feel like read­ing an inter­cepted let­ter. It’s almost uncom­fort­able. Yet while the songs have their moments of expected musi­cal small­ness, of hushed words and strummed gui­tar, Elverum often chooses to mir­ror the emo­tional con­tent of the lyrics (often rep­re­sented with nature imagery) in the music itself, deploy­ing icy chimes, oceans of pound­ing drums, thun­der­ing elec­tric gui­tars, and field record­ings of crack­ling fires. More recently, Matthew Houck, AKA Phos­pho­re­sent, has taken up a sim­i­lar, although more sedate, song­writ­ing style. His sim­ple, mostly acoustic music (scarcely will you hear more than four chords in a song) is built into enor­mous, open spaces. Not as vio­lent as Elverum, Houck’s songs tend to expand via warm cho­ruses of voices; long, relaxed arrange­ments; epic reverb; and, of course, field record­ings of thun­der­storms. Both men are also hugely con­cerned with nature in their lyrics, Elverum’s tow­er­ing moun­tains can stand in for the hor­rors of mor­tal­ity while Houck sees the waves at night as both a reminder of that mor­tal­ity and a sweet promise of all the beauty that awaits us until then.

Now, con­sider Jonas Bon­netta of Evening Hymns, the next in this line of auto­cratic, nat­u­ral­is­tic song­writ­ers with a flair for the cli­mac­tic. Bon­netta described the record­ing of A-side “Dead Deer” to Ampeater thusly: “All my record­ing in the past has been really hushed and this was the first time I really got to play loud on a record­ing. I remem­ber the snowy streets out­side of the gallery and the peo­ple walk­ing by the win­dows as we tracked the gui­tar and I was jump­ing into each chord pre­tend­ing I was in a rock and roll band.” Aside from just being awe­some, this anec­dote shows us the new Bon­netta (most of his pre­vi­ous work has been under his given name instead of the Evening Hymns moniker). The con­tent may remain dark and con­fes­sional, but the music is expan­sive, enor­mous, like the “stars in the desert” rid­dling the sky on B-side “Cedars,” which is a spa­cious elegy built around an elec­tron­i­cally manip­u­lated record­ing of a piano, which was played by a friend and then recorded from one floor down. Bonnetta’s inno­va­tions tend to come in this unob­tru­sive, hum­ble way, in ser­vice of the songs. The piano drone is a per­fect sound­scape over which to set the direct address of “Cedars,” yet it never sticks out as some­thing done for the sake of strange­ness or an air of capital-A Art. It doesn’t even occur to you to ask what it is (it’s pretty much impos­si­ble to tell that it was once a piano) because it sounds so per­fectly matched to the content.

Bon­netta is a native of the small town of Orono, Ontario, now trans­planted to the urban envi­rons of Toronto, but with a heart that still wan­ders out amongst the fields and forests. The image of cedar trees returns over and over again in his new album Spirit Guides, a record that gives you the same kind of feel­ing as gaz­ing out at the tree-lined hori­zon at an hour when it seems like no one else in the world is awake. In the inter­ests of full dis­clo­sure, I should prob­a­bly tell you that this music was pretty much made for me: sim­ple, lovely melodies; male vocals that sound as cracked and worn as old leather twinned in har­mony with ethe­re­ally pure female vocals; mortality-heavy lyrics that hint at tran­scen­dence (“everybody’s gonna live for­ever and no one ever dies any­way”) and are deliv­ered slightly behind the beat; huge cli­maxes with lush vio­lins and flutes and pedal steel. Evening Hymns man­ages to walk the fine line between exper­i­men­ta­tion and melody, intro­spec­tion and cathar­sis. They have songs, but they’re not going to hit you over the head with them, choos­ing instead to let them slowly, organ­i­cally unspool, reveal­ing lyrics about dying that some­how make you feel good.

A-side “Dead Deer” com­mences with the gen­tle, three chord acoustic strums you’d expect, open­ing out into the sim­ple lyri­cal trope of exhausted lovers col­lapsed on the floor. It is both sweet and slightly unnerv­ing, min­gling imagery of sal­va­tion and hand-holding sweet­ness with the implied sex and ani­mal exhaus­tion of the orig­i­nal image: “my body it lies like an ark / like a bridge over yours in the dark”. And then, about 90 sec­onds into the song, a sav­age elec­tric gui­tar breaks every­thing open into the alarm­ing cho­rus of “and I lie like a dead deer / down in the cedars.” That gui­tar feeds an elec­tric­ity directly into the song. Maybe it’s naïve to think so, but you can prac­ti­cally feel Bon­netta jump­ing up and down with each huge chord and all the energy that move­ment imparts. Also note the slight asym­me­try of the gui­tar part just after the tit­u­lar words, the way the chords come every two beats instead of the expected three, which lends a slight dis­com­fort to the music that pushes it onward. The elec­tric gui­tar is so enor­mous it prac­ti­cally strips the lyrics from the vocals for the rest of the song, leav­ing only the soar­ing melodies and the occa­sional word or two that breaks through. Mid­way through the song, strings sneak in under­neath to push the song to even fur­ther heights as that aching cho­rus melody churns and churns before finally with­draw­ing back into the orig­i­nal verse pat­tern, this time led by a gen­tle, under­stated accor­dion. The entire song has the shape of a wave crash­ing on shore – you can see the explo­sion com­ing from the open­ing chords, and soon the song is all sput­ter­ing foam and hun­gry fin­gers of water, but just after­wards, in that last instru­men­tal verse, it looks as if none of it was ever there at all.

“Cedars” packs a lot of emo­tional weight for a B-side, open­ing with a minute of a slowly sim­mer­ing drone before a hym­nal cho­rus of Bon­net­tas sings the rubato verses in that unique voice of his, which shares the husk­i­ness and rough imper­fec­tions of Houck (he doesn’t crack his voice any­where nearly as much as as Houck does, though. I know that dri­ves some peo­ple crazy), yet can tran­scend those flaws to rise into a lovely pure sound, as on the lines “lit up the stars in the desert / reveal the bend­ing of the night.” Gen­tle fin­ger­pick­ing and a sub­lime cho­rus of reverby, female oohs then replaces the drone, sur­round­ing the vul­ner­a­ble yet undra­matic lead vocals with a translu­cent cloud of sound that grad­u­ally yields back into the drone, topped with a clus­ter of breathy flugel­horns and flutes and resolv­ing into, god bless him, a field record­ing of a thun­der­storm. It’s a device that almost shouldn’t work, it’s so fre­quently used, yet it does. There’s really not a much bet­ter way to con­jure up that much open space, that much power and melan­choly. And, if any song deserves the stately solem­nity of a rain­storm, it’s an hon­est and seri­ous elegy like this, writ­ten for Bonnetta’s father and full of the kind of mixed up feel­ings that kind of absence has to cre­ate: “Send for me my lanterns / send for me my maps / cause I lost all my direc­tion / when you got caught in dark, dark traps.” The cho­rus ends with the words “everybody’s gonna live for­ever and no one ever dies any­way” a hope­ful thought of liv­ing on, if only in mem­ory, gen­tly and sadly coun­tered by the song’s last words, in which a gen­tle switch of focus lights up the singer’s own even­tual mor­tal­ity: “You can’t turn this boy around / get­ting older grow­ing down.”

The Cana­dian press has been rav­ing about Spirit Guides since its release last month, but us Yan­kees have been slow to pick up on things. I know it’s hard for us to admit that some­times the Cana­di­ans can do things bet­ter (i.e. health care), but you know, maybe the sting will go away after we all sit down and lis­ten to Evening Hymns for awhile. Let’s not let pride keep us away from this lovely album, eh?

Gabe Birn­baum

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