Brothers Burn Mountain - The Dark Exchange The heck is a dark exchange? I assumed it was a cultural reference, so I asked the great oracle Google. It came up with open source software for trading bitcoin, an obscure sci” fi two-book series and Romans 1:21, the part about idolatry. Yeah, I don’t think it’s any of those. I could have asked the brothers themselves, but if I had to explain my lyrics, I’d do so grumblingly. The lyrics to the title song are brief, so I reprint them here in their entirety:
CD REVIEW RICHARD THOMAS
The picture is a dark tree, Don’t worry. Follow the dark exchange Of shadow and night. Follow the charges of your own Filament. Build a web of innocuous Bafflements. Catch the buzzing lies. Eat them from the inside. Make your own dark truth. Be uncouth. The words suggest the interplay between two forms of darkness, shadow and night. Neither are evil, and in fact are opportunities. You can
“make your own dark truth.” To me it sounds similar to the spiritual writer Starhawk and her seminal 1982 book Dreaming the Dark. She defines the dark as “all that we are afraid of, all that we don’t want to see – fear, anger, sex, grief, death, the unknown.” But the dark is also “the power of the unseen, the power that comes from within, the power of the immanent Goddess who lies coiled in the heart of every cell of every living thing, who is the spark of every nerve and the life of every breath.” It represents change: “Alone no one can dream the dark into love. We need each for that.” So there’s a lot to chew on in this album from the lyrics alone. They’re all intriguing but open to interpretation. The only unambiguous song is “Fire in the Sky (Hiroshima Howl)” which is exactly about what the title says, to mark the bombing’s 75th anniversary.
In other songs the words are enigmatic but easily understood, for the most part. I did a double-take on “Don’t Deny It.” The actual words are, “You scared the cat but the cat grew up ... and now the lion stares you down.” Beautiful metaphor there. But I thought it said, “You scared the cat but the cat threw up” because that’s what cats do. Musically, the brothers, Ryan and Jesse Dermody, have grown from a rustic blues band to something very difficult to define. They don’t fit any genre. Here their music approaches the haunting quality, sadness and minimalism of slowcore, but it’s still too lively and complex. It does demonstrate a definite shift in that direction, being more staid than the previous album, 2018’s Blue Spruce, which had more rock and country. Still with that album I guessed the influence of Low, the quintessential slowcore band, though founder Alan Sparhawk doesn’t care for the term. So what a coincidence, Sparhawk produced four of the songs on this album. His influence seems to have spread to the rest, which overall sounds like a Low album. (Somewhere between Things We Lost in the Fire and The Great Destroyer.) The music doesn’t really move or take you on a journey, and you certainly can’t dance or bop your head to it. it just sits in one place and emanates varying degrees of intensity. There’s a lot of echo and even accompaniment by three different female vocalists. They add a lovely
dimension, but they sound like Low’s Mimi Parker. It gives you the feeling of huddling by a fire deep in the woods amidst a heavy fog, which is probably exactly the effect they were going for. I’m not sure I approve of this direction. I prefer the brothers when they pound the drums and wail and holler and rock out. But they’re an experimental group and they’ll go in whatever the hell direction they want. Who knows where they’ll be next album. Maybe at last, after 20 years of playing, this will be their breakthrough album. Sparhawk did wonders for Robert Plant, who adapted two Low songs, thus staying relevant and netting a Grammy nomination. If you want to hear the brothers in rocking mode, there are plenty of chances to check them out live, despite the virus. On July 18 they did a livestream show at Sacred Heart, which you can view on Youtube. Even though there’s no audience (and no air-conditioning in the middle of the heat wave) it’s one hell of a show, full of energy and mounting intensity. I also appreciated hearing the selections from this album without the studio production. It sounded more amiable and down to earth. This Saturday, Sept. 12, at 6 p.m. they’ll be doing a livestream concert from the bog, the location of their studio in the woods north of Duluth (see thebrothersburnmountain.com). On Sept. 26 they’ll perform at Cedar Lounge.
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DuluthReader.com
September 10, 2020
