Austin based quintet Balmorhea makes really good instrumental music; that’s maybe an overly simple way to start a review, but it is totally true.  More erudite reviewers would cite a slew of modern composers that the band draws influence and inspiration from. (A review of their 2008 effort, River Arms, on P4K referenced Stravinsky, Keith Jarrett and Arvo Part in the introduction.  If you didn’t have to Google at least two of those cats to confirm that they’re not made up and/or prime ministers of European nations, you are one step ahead of me.)  That approach strikes me as dangerously elitist.  When reading that aforementioned P4K review, I felt uninformed, out of the loop, unhip; it’s a critical approach that seeks to draw attention to the reviewer, not to the music, as in “Look at me!  I write on the internet!  I know things that you do not know!”  While the review was positive, (Balmorhea is the bomb; more on that in a second.) it left me feeling that I needed to brush up on 20th century avant garde composers; I’d rather leave readers with a hankering to listen to the record I’m reviewing.  So, today: no high-brow guilt trips from me, just an honest appraisal of a sweet record.

The good news is that you don’t have to be a musicology major to enjoy Constellations, Balmorhea’s third record.  It’s not difficult in the traditional sense; there’s not a lot of atonality or aggressively weird stuff happening.  Further, the record probably benefits from the post-rock folks; this is nothing like Explosions in the Sky, but bands like that have (I think) blazed a bit of a trail into the music listening conciousness, helping modern man understand that it’s okay to listen to records that don’t have words. The album appeals to the jazzier side of my brain without quite being a jazz record.  The songs (songs might be the wrong word here, in that these are probably more truly defined as compositions, but “songs” feels more natural) are generally focused on a clean and assertive piano line that gradually invites in other elements; the piano dominates much of the record, but there’s a ton of really compelling string work as well.  This propensity to share the stage is probably what gives me the jazz  vibe; there’s not as much hyperactive virtuosity on display as on  a Medeski, Martin and Wood record, but there are songs here that would fit on a record like Tonic.  The title implies a contemplation of the stars and their movements; the music works in that contemplative tone.  There’s a lot of drifting, a lot of tension with little resolution, a certain depth of sound that implies our smallness in the universe.  It’s a good record for reflective tasks; it sounds good in the headphones when reading or writing or thinking.

We’ve got a song from the record below; it captures the incremental sound of the album well.  There’s a slow integration of a bunch of moving parts that Balmorhea uses to great effect throughout.  That piano from the second paragraph doesn’t make a significant appearance on “Bowsprit,” but the banjo is killer.  You can snag the rest of the record on February 23 from the folks at Western Vinyl.  If “Bowsprit” is up your street, Constellations will not disappoint.  (I made it through the whole thing without mentioning Erik Satie.  That wasn’t that hard.)

Balmorhea – Bowsprit

Balmorhea put me in the mood for “Echoes.”  There’s not an obvious linear connection between Pink Floyd and Balmorhea, but they share an ear for the adventurous and a yearning for the skies.  You almost certainly know that “Echoes” syncs up nearly perfectly with the final stretch of Kubrick’s 2001 and that that syncronization is mind-numbing.  You might not know, however, that Roger Waters believes that Andrew Lloyd Webber stole a bit of “Echoes” for The Phantom of the Opera.  More importantly, Waters hates Lloyd-Weber passionately for that alleged transgression.  If either Mr. Waters of Mr. Lloyd-Webber would like to settle their beef in the comments today, I’d welcome it.  If Citizen Dick can help heal the rift between prog rock and bad musical theater, we’d be proud to do so.

Pink Floyd – Echoes – Live, 1970

John Donne told me that the bell tolls for me (or us, I guess) and, this week, it tolled twice.  As a people, we’re worse off because of the loss of Howard Zinn and J.D. Salinger.  It’s odd (and, obviously, tragic) to lose two writers who worked in such radically different idioms in the span of a few days; Salinger was the flame too intense to sustain itself (dude last published in the sixties), while Zinn was the ember that kept a million fires ablaze (my man walked the walk, jamming his finger in the eye of the man for as long as it (his finger) would straighten into a point).  Kevin is more of a Salinger devotee than I am (I’ve read it all, but I actually like phonies, so that’s puts me in kind of an awkward situation), but Zinn spoke to my iconoclastic soul.    Zinn told me to aggressively work against things that I knew to be wrong; he told me to be an active participant in the world around me.  In short, “you can’t be neutral on a moving train.”  Fuck yeah.  I’ll miss his voice, but will swaddle myself in his writing.  I’ll hand my children A People’s History of the United States and warn them to be wary of authority in all its forms (even mine), as it is rarely  purely benevolent.  I’ll try to think for myself, even though there are scores of forces that will encourage me not to.  I’ll try to do right by my fellow man, even when it seems disadvantageous to do so.  Essentially, to honor Mr. Zinn, I’ll make sure that The Man knows I’m watching, that  I am pissed and that I am not afraid to tell the world about it.  Flights of angels and all that.  To close today, we’ve got the best elegy ever written by a hippie (or, possibly, anybody).  Cheers.

Grateful Dead – Ripple – Live, 1981