Call the copse!
Baltimore’s heavy folk-rockers hit a new peak. By John Mulvey.
Arbouretum ★★★★ Let It All In THRILL JOCKEY. CD/DL/LP
THE PATH to Hell Roaring Creek is not one of the toughest in Montana, nor in the vicinity of the Yellowstone River. It does, though, have landmarks to conjure with: Storm Castle Peak, Gallatin Peak, Jumbo Mountain, Big Sky. The trail takes two or three hours; keeping bear spray to hand is strongly advised.
It’s here we find Dave Heumann, transcendentalist hiker and spiritual core of Arbouretum, in the midst of a song called Headwaters II. In common with much of his work from the past 15 or so years, it presents Heumann as attuned to the wilderness, adept at channelling its majesty and vicissitudes. “I’ve been downstream for as long as I can recall,” he laments, on a quest back to the source “where the sky breaks to meet the divide.”
The sound is a kind of martial folk rock, not unlike the eldritch corners of R.E.M.’s Fables Of The Reconstruction. But where Michael Stipe murmured, Heumann favours a stentorian clarity, and his penchant for a guitar solo radically exceeds the parsimony of Peter Buck. After three minutes and 50 seconds, he soars away from the modal rigour of his bandmates, on a needling trajectory that shadows one Richard Thompson might’ve taken in Sloth. The way to enlightenment can be treacherous, the views dizzying. In Heumann, though, we have a guide to rely on: sure of foot, calm of disposition, heroically relentless in his pursuit of the wild sublime.
This, broadly, is the landscape Heumann and Arbouretum have mapped over seven albums now. Far from the cultivated nature suggested by their name, their music has consistently evoked the cosmic and elemental: Comanche moons and waxing crescents; dirt trails and eyries. From a base in Baltimore, there have been outlying moments, notably a two-guitar period redolent of Television (2009’s Song Of The Pearl), and a phase suggesting drone metallers Om rescoring the Child Ballads (2013’s Coming Out Of The Fog). Mostly, though, they’ve focused on melding the courtly melodies of British folk to a churning, low-end psychedelia.
There are no bad records in the Arbouretum catalogue, and many of Heumann’s other activities – under his own name; anchoring Coil Sea – are worth investigating too. Nevertheless, Let It All In is an unusually welcoming entry point, especially the opener, How Deep It Goes. If Heumann sometimes comes across as a stern esoteric, a conduit for incantations rather than lyrics, How Deep It Goes finds him in softer timbre, apocalyptic visions of “the ocean opening in black and deepest crimson” notwithstanding. Again, there’s an affinity with earlyish R.E.M. – Maps And Legends, maybe – but, again, Heumann takes the jangle as a launchpad for another exploratory jam, one where his guitar can embrace the fluctuating tonalities of a Terry Riley piece without undermining the sturdy construction of a rock song.
In 2010, at a New York show, Arbouretum played Sister Ray for an hour before being replaced by Endless Boogie, who kept it going for an hour more, and you can hear that hypnotised commitment to the VU ramalam on Let It All In’s title track. A mere 12 minutes long, it starts at a surging motorik clip, the current line-up bolstered by two drummers, before Heumann starts strafing across his bandmates, with a guitar virtuosity to match that of his closest contemporary, Chris Forsyth.
Let It All In seems like a logically grandiose closer to such a storm-buffeted album. But the record actually ends on High Water Song, and Arbouretum reconfiguring themselves into a raggedy, Stonesy bar band, with honky-tonk piano supplied by Hans Chew, and a horn section staggering in at the death. The vibe is loose, as if the band are kicking back after a day battling both the environment and existential crises, but in reality it’s written from the perspective of a climate refugee. And so the deeper meaning of Let It All In emerges in the midst of an apparent good time: elemental dramas have political as well as metaphysical ramifications. “Can’t fight the wind,” sings Heumann, “Can’t dry the rain/Can’t reach the sea, except by following a stream down all the way to the end.”
Far-out, kaleidoscopic fifth studio set from virtuosic cosmic funkers.
SINCE SETTING out their stall with the suitably titled Skullfuckery on DJ Shadow’s The Outsider in 2006, The Heliocentrics have barely paused for breath; abusing genres at will alongside Ethio-jazz grandfather Mulatu Astatke, Persian pioneer Lloyd Miller and tenor firebrand Shabaka Hutchings. Such freewheeling diversity shines anew amid Elephant Walk’s skronking sax-mania and Hanging By A Thread’s peppy old school breakdowns – driven by Malcolm Catto’s turbo-powered drums and Jake Ferguson’s escalating bass lines. But it’s singer Barbora Patkova’s soulful charge that brings a tighter focus to a set of roiling, otherworldly jams which sound like Can and Funkadelic getting high on Sun Ra’s unfettered jazz supply. It reaches an expansive, rhythmically potent apex on People Wake Up! – a seemingly trippy affair that veers radically offpiste at its simmering, violinpropelled denouement.
Andy Cowan