Christian Kiefer and Jefferson Pitcher aren't the most obvious of collaborators. Kiefer is an indie-folk balladeer that parlays his gentle voice and dusky acoustic guitar into haunting blurs of tone and melody (think a dronier Iron & Wine). Pitcher is a Northern Californian sound artist that explores the possibilities of field recordings, feedback, and prepared guitars. Then again, Kiefer habitually renders the naturalistic strange, while Pitcher makes the strange sound natural. On this nautically themed collaboration, which purportedly draws inspiration from the poetry of Pablo Neruda and the fiction of Jose Saramago, Kiefer and Pitcher find each other precisely at the seam where their mirror-image aesthetics meet. As a result, there are no jarring moments when one collaborator overtakes the other. To All Dead Sailors displays a fluid undulation from starry indie-folk to inert sound collage and back again, never breaking its lulling wave-like motion along the way.
Kiefer and Pitcher share vocal duties on the album, and their voices will make or break this project for most listeners: In a mostly understated record, they're as overt as a neon signs, and their inflections can be tender to the point of preciosity. But as long as you've a decently high threshold for the saccharine, they're terrific-- both singers sound gracefully open and velvety, playing off of each other so seamlessly that it's difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. The vocal presence on this album can evoke Rufus Wainwright when it's low, with subtle vibrato; Ben Gibbard when it's high and airy; Holopaw's John Orth when tensed and straining, always moving without friction between these modes.
To All Dead Sailors, mirroring the singers' tone, is dense with longing. Each song seems to strain against the boundary of its simple instrumental palette, as if the depth of feeling contained inside exceeds the size of the well. After a mood-setting field recording of waves and seagulls, "Ship Under Sand" slowly gathers a melancholy electric guitar figure and bending foghorn-like tones into an ominous dirge, which spills into "The Captain", a chiming hymn that features the first instance of the recurring lyrical and melodic motif, "Oh Captain, bring me home." Kiefer and Pitcher invoke this captain throughout the album, alternately in tones of salvation and damnation: "The Captain leads the ship into the rocks/ The watchmen will sleep there with the fishes," Kiefer warns on the banjo-flecked lullaby "Carpenters and Sailors". "Erendira and the Ocean" features the first reprise of the "Oh Captain" refrain, this time amid bright flashes of nylon strings. The sparse instrumentation and existential despair of "Burial at Sea" evoke Damien Jurado at his most retiring, and "Astrolabe" is a churning trail song (although the trail happens to lead to Mars).
Pitcher's experimental presence flickers through all of these otherwise trad tunes, and becomes overt in the elegant abstract passages that interleave them. "Marconi Brings the Cypher" finds Kiefer's thinned-out voice tracing a fragile melody through vanishing chimes; it's equal parts the submerged rumble of Sailor Winters and the nebulous discomfort of early Nick Drake. "The Engineer's Dream" barely exists; it's just a music box tinkle buried in a distant roar. The curtains of reverb-heavy guitar on "The Mermaid and the Drunks" grind down nauseously, like a radio expending the last of its battery charge. Given the glut of indie-folk records that render the sea's mysteries in similar trappings-- sampled birds, weary harmonies, and dusty acoustic strings-- you couldn't be blamed for finding the conceit a bit tiresome by now. But this duo's sly embellishments, potent voices, and weighty songwriting makes To All Dead Sailors well-worth enlisting for one more voyage. Bonus points for not succumbing to the siren song of the sea chantey, one of indie music's most overused tricks as of late.
