Brightblack Morning Light Motion to Rejoin by: Thomas Mendelovits Thu:25-Sep-08 Label: Matador Year: 2008 WB rating 74 out of 100

On a record that pretty much all sounds the same, it’s a weird experience having one moment stand out above all the rest. It happens eight seconds into ‘Hologram Buffalo’, the first proper track of Motion to Rejoin, Brightblack Morning Light’s third full-length, and after it sinks into your consciousness, you may just be playing air Rhodes for days. It’s a sort of shuffly little jive; a bass chord with a tinkling, syncopated higher octave rhythm that comes after it in a delicious reverie that may just as easily go unnoticed. And Brightblack Morning Light are okay with that. Setting their gospel and blues-tinged tunes behind a thick haze of fuzz and low frequency rumble, the Rhodes and guitar duo of Rachael Hughes and Nathan Shineywater seem happiest when inviting the listener to settle within the mist that they blissfully create.

On first impression, the overwhelming narcolepsy that pervades the album may prove slightly drowsy for its own good. Occasionally, it’s as though Hughes is falling asleep at the keyboard, constantly trying to revive herself to finish the songs. Indeed, perhaps the main factor in deciding how much you will get out of Motion to Rejoin is simply down to how much time you are willing to invest in letting yourself be swept up in the band’s distant, but extremely sultry, universe. While they rely on the rhythmic and subtly warming character of the Rhodes electric piano as a driving force in all of their arrangements, Brightblack Morning Light are all but stunted in the palette of sounds they bring to this effective operating principle. ‘Summer Hoof’, perhaps the dreamiest number of all, puts pealing vibraphones and New Orleans jazz funeral horns behind the Rhodes, while the noirish-funk of ‘Past a Weatherbeaten Fencepost’ would probably serve the James Bond franchise better in bringing dangerously and sexy back than Jack White’s recent lame attempt. Throughout the record, these instrumental touches are only ever notional, like the floating Hammond organ of ‘Another Reclamation’, which is barely there but still fundamental. These touches are almost consistently intriguing in how integral they are to the aural context of Motion to Rejoin in placing the songs and the listener in a foreign context. At its best, the sensation is akin to walking down the stairs of a club to the band room and being greeted with a concoction so beautifully warm you never could have expected it.

Over and above the lovely production, a patina that never once is scrubbed of its languid lustre, Motion to Rejoin remains lacking in the inspiration behind the pacing that made their 2006 self-titled debut for Matador so impressive. For a band with their influences as assimilated as Brightblack Morning Light, it is surely intentional that their songs sound the same. However, despite the deft ingenuity of their arrangements, things do get slightly sludgy; as with the funky sax and shakers at the end of ‘Gathered Years’, which don’t quite manage to bring the track’s eight minutes into sharper focus. Critiquing the band’s failure to make music of immediately perceivable splendour misses the point to some extent but still, a band like Beach House manage moments of intensity in spite of their chosen downtempo-ness. Similar not just in their female/male duo make-up, but also in the atmospheric keyboards plus colouring guitars backbone of both bands, Beach House’s Devotion never sacrificed its permeating, steamy vibe for tunes that killed at a degree to which nothing on Motion to Rejoin ever matches.

For their ‘Pretty Vacant’ single cover, the Sex Pistols offered two destinations: a bus to ‘Nowhere’ or a bus to ‘Boredom’. Perhaps the music Brightblack Morning Light make could be taken as much as an aesthetic as a political statement, albeit in a far more covert way than it was for the Pistols. The back-story to this record puts Hughes and Shineywater on a New Mexico mesa with only solar power for electricity and there is indeed something of the Artist As Outsider to the lyrics as Shineywater intones on ‘Gathered Years’ to “rise up in the morning with the light/rise up in the morning, before they take it all”, while the protest mantra of ‘Oppression’s Each’ is similarly direct: “nobody wants oppression/we don’t need oppression”. In the first year that a majority of the world’s population lives in urban areas, moving to the country could just be the most politically loaded action possible. Furthermore, in this most crucial period for US politics, Motion to Rejoin celebrates the best aspects of its mother country; both musically and in the relaxed freedom inherent to the band’s sound. In proffering mood and implied significance over the more common penchant for concrete relevance, Brightblack Morning Light are continuing to create an Americana far more lustrous than that of some of its more jingoistic exponents.