Bowerbirds: "Northern Lights"

For the first track made available by their label, “Northern Lights” doesn’t announce a whole lot, even to listeners unfamiliar with Bowerbirds’ often compelling haunted forest-folk. It does not sound like a band trying to rework its basic style, nor does it sound like a new direction. If anything, it’s a teaser track that could get the band lumped in with the seeming thousands of indie-folk bands mining similar territory, as the things that made Hymns For a Dark Horse (2007) immediate, like Beth Tacular’s harmonies and accordion leads, are either muted or absent entirely. That aside, the differences between this and much of the band’s first album are slight at best; it wouldn’t be terribly difficult for this to fall somewhere in the middle of that record without it ever really getting much attention, overshadowed by songs with more urgent arrangements and melodies.

What makes “Northern Lights” work to some extent, though, are the moments that serve to break out from the relatively unremarkable guitar-and-voice arrangement. The slightly out-of-tune upright piano that jumps in and out creates several such moments, as does Matt Damron’s cymbal work, which makes subtle rhythmic shifts and becomes aggressive suddenly and unexpectedly. Both are off-putting, but never distracting, and they help to carry Phil Moore’s less than indelible melodies, though he claims not to need “a waterfall of careless praise” from me. Conveniently for him, in my case, a much smaller, more apprehensive body of water will do, since there’s not a whole lot to gush about.