Bowerbirds shouldn't work. A boyfriend and girlfriend, he equipped with acoustic guitar, she with accordion, singing intensely earnest songs redolent of natural imagery that espouse with near-monomaniacal zeal a belief in the deep interconnectedness of human beings, animals, and the Earth. At a glance the whole thing smacks of hippie bullshit, but Phil Moore and Beth Tacular aren't trying to guilt you into making a donation to PETA, and they sure as shit aren't trying to take you on some lysergic-fueled trip. Certainly these guys have a particular worldview, but it's largely because of that purity of vision that the group's music succeeds, creating an immersive listening experience that can yield beauty and magic for anyone who isn't wholly given over to cynicism.
Bowerbirds' second LP, Upper Air, is nearly a carbon copy of its predecessor, Hymns for a Dark Horse. I'm going to let the band off the hook for the holding pattern; in the meantime, we'll simply revel in the general loveliness of these 10 compositions, which utilize the debut's blueprints in the creation of sublime melodies, absorbing lyricism and delicate harmonic interplay.
As I said before, listening to Bowerbirds demands immersion. It's not hard to scoff at a line like "At the margins of the land I get to know your skin" or "I live in your tall tree amongst your fearless leaves" if you're only dipping a toe. However, once you surrender to the group's internal logic, its values and ways of speech, the effect is routinely mesmerizing, not to mention far wiser and more self-aware than you'd expect at first blush. Take "Teeth", where Tacular's accordion seems to teeter between sorrow and resilience while the words offer the matching promise of "a brilliant flame in a dark time." Or "Northern Lights", which grounds its flights of fancy ("I don't need from you a waterfall of careless praise") in faintly Zeppelin III-ish acoustic strumming and the great line, "I don't expect a Southern girl to know the Northern Lights." Once you've surrendered to Bowerbirds' verdant landscapes and convinced yourself they're not so drastically different from your own, it's suddenly not so hard to follow Moore as he spirals out tendrils of imagery like "Further up in the Ponderosa/ The nervous coyotes caterwauling their choruses."
Above all else, two moments stand out, and mostly rectify the fact that the middle third of the album is sparse on melodies and the closer ("This Day") is a dull dud. Aside from providing a great potential name for a Pavement cover band, "Crooked Lust" finds Moore compellingly stretching outside his usual vocal range atop subtly entrancing marimbas. Meanwhile, "Silver Clouds" perhaps constitutes the most beautiful thing Bowerbirds have yet committed to record, as Moore's voice dips and breaks in all sorts of spine-tingling ways, cautioning, "You could move like a silver cloud through the skies/ You could move like a secret and slip past my life." It's just another fragile, evocative snapshot of an insular world that's paradoxically as big as all outdoors.
