From Ned Oldham's Box Tree Records imprint comes Arbouretum, a recording project by his brother Will's erstwhile backing guitarist Dave Heumann. Since the Long Live the Well-Doer was created, Arbouretum have developed into a touring band with a full roster; they're recording a group album now. But this record is primarily the work of Heumann and drummer David Bergander, and the skimpy lineup contributes to its clarity of vision and lucid specificity. The record rings with the quiet purity of a pin dropped on tile, locating its force in translucence and strategic omission.
Long Live the Well-Doer is rather unusually divided into two distinct songwriting styles-- austere yet richly detailed instrumentals and majestic, lo-fi indie folk anthems. The demarcation is clear: Heumann doesn't allow the two modes to blur together; he deliberately counterpoises one against the other in precarious, hypnotic equilibrium. The most striking antecedent is Dave Pajo's Papa M project, particularly the instrumental/lyrical dichotomy and mirage-like shimmer of Whatever, Mortal.
Long Live the Well-Doer immediately sets about conjuring the wilderness it wearily traverses with "Sands and Sands", with its intermittent cascades of clattering percussion, the ebb and flow of slithering arpeggios, and distant chimes. On "I Am a Somnambulist", a baroque acoustic guitar figure morphs into a ramshackle dirge of shuffling electric guitar and patchwork strings, as if a DJ were crossfading Six Organs of Admittance into Califone. "Early Bird Gets the Worm" changes gears, collapsing the other instrumentals' spacious atmospheres into linear articulations of forward momentum, with its clicking drums, rigid wire of guitar, lyrical bass line, and squealing electric leads.
The savage blankness of the instrumentals is tempered by vocal tracks that ascend like beacons, their brightness amplified by the murky distances between them. "Sands Upon Sands" bleeds into "Jonas Got a Tooth", a (smog)gy four-track epic that unveils Heumann's matter-of-fact baritone-- it's a long crescendo described via muted, incremental shifts in intensity and rhythm. "Don't Let It Show" is a staticky, coasting lament that seems always on the verge of grinding to a halt-- like melancholic moans drizzling over a plodding folk ballad. And on "All That Has Come Isn't Gone", Heumann parades up and down his range, his voice cracking and stretching through crisply enunciated vocal glissandos. Profiting from the tension between these two modes, Long Live the Well-Doer is a startlingly fine (if discomfortingly barren) expanse of windswept aridity, a haunted and piercingly simple desert music limned in stark silhouettes and sepia tones.
