Everyday Balloons out 3/2/10 on Team Love
I’m on a serious mission. I’m so much stronger than anyone knew
and I’m still waiting for a Midday Moon.
Everyday Balloons, by A Weather of Portland, OR, is here. Two years after the critically acclaimed Cove (Team Love, 2008), the band has released another collection of scrupulously crafted indie rock songs, rife with intricate vocal and instrumental beauty. It is an album of fleeting moments, words, and sounds, as elevated by glimpses of euphoric unison as it is grounded in studied specificity.
And it’s no fun standing here like a snowman
trapped inside a cloudy snow globe, waiting for someone to shake me.
There is the same depth and mystery that lent Cove such staying power, but the songs on Everyday Balloons collectively radiate with the sound of a group growing more comfortable with each other and with the interplay of expansiveness and detail, the long view and the close-up. Coupled with songwriter Aaron Gerber’s varyingly cryptic and concrete lyrics, where grand platitudes sit aside staggering and sharp details, the effect is a new intensity that shifts from the slowly enveloping desperation of “Lay Me Down,” an epic exploration of fatigue and faith, to the crashing electric guitars and triumphant rhythmic pulse of “Third of Life,” to the playful jabs of the piano-centric “Winded,” without ever losing a step. Being light-of-foot paradoxically deepens the intimacy at the heart of Gerber’s and Sarah Winchester’s perfectly-matched musings…Often on two disparate trajectories, their voices (his: sleepy, serene; hers: emotive, effulgent) meet for moments and entwine before carrying on their specific courses like two strands of ivy on a brick wall.
Hollow like dune grass but holding up hillsides,
I’ll be the weak thing that stops your eroding.
Everday Balloons was recorded throughout the spring and early summer of 2009 at Portland’s Type Foundry studios by master indie folk engineer Adam Selzer (M. Ward, The Decemberists, Norfolk & Western). The restrained, simple production leaves room for a band interested in nuance even as it branches out into complexity: here into barely controlled noise, there into a winking, teasing, delicate counterpoint. Swirling string-sounds, organ and analog effects enrich A Weather’s core instrumentation of Winchester’s precise and inventive drumming, bassist Lou Thomas’ jubilant melodies, and the hovering, spare guitar work of Gerber and Aaron Krenkel.
This is the sound of four people in a room. It is the sound of one person in a basement. This is the sound of the sacred, humble and hushed, and it is the sound of the commonplace, raucous and celebratory.
The radiator where you lay curled up like a fallen hair.
My love a clingstone, like a window with its morning ice.
A shift in one’s point of view, a slight change in the light as clouds skirt the edge of the sun, the tree tops skitter against the skyline; grandeur becomes the mundane, and back again. A Weather harnesses the margin. There’s a moon at mid-day, an ice storm. You might never sleep again, or you might sleep for days. You’re as apt to gasp as you are to shrug. You might sink through the bottom of your shoes, or you might float away. Stranger things happen everyday.
It’s not the fall that we should be afraid of. It’s the quick stop.
