A few months back, Bradford Cox's blog featured a YouTube clip in which a teenager recorded himself covering Bon Iver, Beach House, Panda Bear, and (of course) Deerhunter, along with some original material. Regardless of the quality of the renditions, what struck me was the illustration of instantaneous influence in 2009 captured in real time-- once even the bigger underground names would have had to fester in obscurity for a while before their presence was felt in a larger context. But as it becomes increasingly easy to record as well as distribute music, it's become increasingly likely that bands that are forming right this second could be heard from six months or a year from now, not only before they've taken the time to establish their own identity, but while their most obvious precedents might still be riding out their last record release cycle.
Take, for example, Our Brother the Native, still teens when signed to the esteemed FatCat imprint. Even if that's like getting an Ivy acceptance letter, they took massive student loans from contemporaries like the Books and especially Animal Collective up-to-and-including-Sung Tongs. Tooth & Claw, their proper debut, was released in 2006, the very, very tail-end of "freak-folk as an ongoing concern with the indie kids." It was promising and flawed and in love with its source material, as to be expected, but at least they were on the right track-- it's sort of disingenuous to reward youth qua youth, but likewise, it's tough to pass judgment if you were covering Sponge songs in your garage at the same age (um, not that I'd know).
But with Sacred Psalms, it's hard to shake the idea that maybe that they could've used some time woodshedding with proper songs*.* These guys love their brassy, ringing textures-- chimes, gamelan, thumb pianos, and the like subsumed by a hazy production veil of buzz and reverb. Problem is, they like them all at the same time, and parsing the clamorous "Well Bred" is like trying to pick out individual flavors in a Long Island Iced Tea; get to "Dusk" and it's like trying to do the same after five. The album's first half tries to conjure an Elverum-styled sense of naturalist dread with doomy, didgeridoo-like drones, wandering acoustics, and scratchy vocal snippets, and it eventually wafts out of those murky eddies into a nearly dancehall-derived drumbeat. Which is admittedly a neat direction, but the only reason I can't use the term "momentum-killing" in regards to its forbidding seven-minute runtime is that there isn't much momentum to kill, by design. Like drum circles or pre-shot-clock NBA games, it's easy to see how lack of structure is freeing to its participants and repellent to its observers.
In Mark Richardson's review of Tooth & Claw, he offered the hope that Our Brother's iffy singing could be fixed with time (or at least a vocal coach), but you have to wonder if they're so enamored with a type of sylvan authenticity that troubleshooting never crossed their minds. This style of music doesn't require a conventional-sounding voice or even a really good one. But while "Well Bred" and "Manes" have hooks that feel more substantial and stand-alone than any from their debut, even if their appearance gives one the feeling of brief moments of clarity after being roused from a particularly intense siesta. But they're still employed in the same-defeating way, delivered by unpleasantly overwrought Beirut (the band)-via-Baltimore (the scene, ca. 2007) vocals that evoke any number of post-Fugazi emoists rather than catharsis or celebration.
Closer "Endless Winter" doesn't totally redeem the 40 minute-investment in Sacred Psalms' nougat-y center, but it does sort of serve as a potential corrective-- it bears plenty in common with what preceded, what with its maundering tempo and multimedia samples (though their pan-Arabic sound brings to mind too much mawkish sound collage from 2002). But a disarmingly straightforward piano melody stumbles nakedly in and out, by a large margin the most memorable and simple passage on a record that's too strained in voice and in reverence to bands that paved the way with years of bold and blind experimentation before they ended up sounding like themselves (and really, that's the unifying quality of 2009's Indie Big Three). The Deer Tick of freak-folk? Discuss...
