Contributed By: The Messiah
Created On: Friday, 15 February 2008
Hits: 66
 Rivers Arms If those names don't mean much, think of Balmorhea as a freshman-level seminar in making pretty music that works on multiple levels. Most everyone should make it through class and carry something away, while others may use it as an inlet into deeper lessons: On the surface, Balmorhea's music is gorgeous, dynamic, and emotive, a bit like Sigur Rós with an interest in understatement. Rivers Arms combines piano, acoustic and electric guitars, banjo, strings, and samples into short passes, so that nothing's too consuming or exhausting. Though it lasts just less than an hour, Rivers Arms cycles through motifs without wasting many seconds or losing interest.
Rivers Arms offers little in terms of technical or compositional innovation, but it does capitalize on a facet of instrumental music that's constantly suggested but rarely accomplished: Despite its often elegiac turns and always graceful maneuvers, the music here leaves itself open to individual interpretation. The songs certainly have their moods, and titles taken from seasons or places suggest inspirations and implications. But these songs never exist in a vacuum, and any dominant air always makes room for the counterpart that's just around the bend. Like "The Winter": All twinkling guitars, fleeting sheets of strings, and piano lines that drift downward in diagonal columns, it feels like the season it proclaims. But traces of hope flicker from twinkling guitars, lining the melancholy. The melody is handled meticulously, too, creating stillness and movement in the same space. "The Summer", which precedes "The Winter", opens with atonal cello sustains. Even though a duet of bucolic acoustic guitars eventually dances above those strings, the foreboding drones hover at the brink, threatening from a distance like a surprise Texas snow cloud.
Such is Balmorhea: Texas gets a rough (if deserved) rap for its extremes, from Plano football games and their cinematic scores to obstinate world leaders and their stubborn ideas. But Balmorhea flashes brilliance only to a highlight a slow-burning constancy that's at the core of one of the year's early slow wonders.
 
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