The Austin, Texas duo Balmorhea seem quite inspired by their surroundings, and not just in naming their band after a Texas spring-fed lake. Rivers Arms is wide-open music, frequently beautiful, that echoes the simple yet impressive terrain of the Lone Star state in rich fashion. Rob Lowe and Michael Muller, the pair that make up Balmorhea's core membership, make music of a contemplative nature, augmenting acoustic guitar and piano with additional strings to create modest compositions that, despite their rather unadorned construction, consistently blossom into a richly woven texture of astutely arranged sound.
Balmorhea's beauty, however, isn't without its flaws. This isn't to say that River Arms is rife with mistakes or awkward constructions; on the contrary, if anything, the opposite is true. Lowe and Muller's arrangements aren't superficial, but there is a degree to which they adhere too repeatedly to the same tropes that can mar many soundtracks. Instrument interaction, swells in the music, the birth ands progression of harmonic accompaniment all come and go in a rather predictable manner, and while it's undeniable that the results are often pleasing to the ears, when Rivers Arms goes even slightly off of the beaten trail, it's surprising how welcome the shifts are. "Context," a mix of field recordings (some musical, some not), is a buoy, perhaps the most interesting track on the album for its ability to retain a sense of beauty amidst more challenging listening. Recordings of crowds and trains make appearances elsewhere, but only on "Context" do these sampled sounds get first billing. Another highlight, "Process" sacrifices little in the way of melody, but the addition of a more interestingly jumbled mix, with the plaintive guitar crowded by some decidedly less polished accompaniment, makes the track stand out amongst its peers.
It's not that Balmorhea need to be abstruse to be enjoyable; Rivers Arms, even at its most straightforward, is a disc with it's share of comely charm. But, by its close, the album seems to have swam by too smoothly, with some of its beauty rendered ineffective in its failure to inspire attentive listening. This is Balmorhea's first widely-available release, so, for most, it's likely an introduction to the group. But, given River Arms' relative lack of diversity in sound, and the music's tendency to adhere to rather well-worn maneuvers of composition and arrangement, to many listeners, this disc will be reminiscent of a sound they've heard many times before.
