Sometime last spring, the four members of Detroit’s Bonny Doon fled to a house in the woods of Northern Michigan for a creative retreat near the auspiciously named Mystic Lake. Over the course of one very productive week, the band wrote their second album, Longwave, a sober, spartan folk-rock record with a spontaneous feel. “Sometimes we’ll just go up and bring and a tape machine and record sessions for four or five days,” said Bill Lennox, one of the group’s two singer-songwriters, in an interview last year. Remote in the wilderness, away from their routine, this verdant little album was abruptly born.
This narrative is so familiar that it’s made The Onion: “Man Just Going to Grab Guitar and Old Four-Track, Go Out to Cabin in Woods, Make Shittiest Album Anyone’s Ever Heard” was a howlingly funny headline as early as 2011. But Longwave, thankfully, is much less hackneyed than its framing device, and Bonny Doon exhibit less irritating self-seriousness than might be expected of a band that found its muse in the trees.
Lennox and his co-writer, Bobby Colombo, bring a light touch to their melancholic alt-country songs, staying moody but avoiding the overly stern or solemn. The surface appeal of their sound—the breezy, imperturbable nonchalance, what Lennox has called their “stoned sort-of minimalism”—has more to do with California than Detroit. Even so, darker tones of despair and casual cynicism come through in the lyrics. “And I should be happy, but I’m not/But I’m not/And I should be grateful, I know, but I’m not,” Lennox sings airily on “A Lotta Things.” On “Part of Me,” they make an effort to derive from the misery a kind of lesson: “Appreciate the harder times/To know what it feels like.”
After their wilderness writing session, Bonny Doon returned to record the album at the Key Club studio in Western Michigan, aiming to capture the vibe from the lake house as simply as possible. In this they’ve succeeded: There’s a stark immediacy to the production on Longwave, rendering the band’s simple arrangements and basic chords without a shade of embellishment. They’d much rather use negative space than a dynamic flourish.
A less generous listener might hear this album’s loose, easygoing quality as carelessness, and the band does little to dispel that impression. “Walkdown,” the closer, meanders on for three unfulfilling minutes. “Saved,” at nearly six minutes the album’s longest track, sputters into near-silence midway through before picking back up into an aimless several-minute jam session. The press release, tellingly, highlights this almost-flubbed take as “a candid moment that encapsulates the spirit of Longwave.” Their commitment to spontaneity is admirable, even if it’s not always fruitful.
