Stone Breath - The Silver Skein Unwound
(Camera Obscura)
Another fine collection of murder ballads and haunted nursery rhymes accompanied by Timothy Renner's banjo, dulcimer, bouzouki, sitar-like revelator guitar, and headless horsefiddle, Prydwyn's soaring flutes and harmonium and Sarada's angelic harmonies and guitar drones. There's much more of a religious fervor about the tracks this time around, as exemplified on "A Bottle of Breath," which tracks down a religious lunatic proseletizing the Gospel of Christ on Christmas Eve in Renner's home town of Glen Rock, PA, and bears more than a passing resemblance to the Bible-banging preacher last heard foaming at the mouth from his soapbox pulpit on recent Godspeed You Black Emperor! albums.
Scarecrows, ghosts, open graves, lyrics lifted from biblical passages from Matthew and the Song of Soloman, and countless references to Christ's suffering (the crown of thorns, the "nails of Christ," the holy cross, etc.) all lead up to one of the year's darkest examinations of guilt and man's search for meaning in an intolerably cruel and inhuman world. Hell, Renner almost makes Leonard Cohen sound cheerful. But Prydwyn's omnipresent flute manages to lift us from the muck, offering hope from the eternal flame of death.
Several tracks continue Renner's fascination with love after death (a favorite theme in wyrdfolk), and there are numerous visits to graveyards, forests, and wooded enclaves. As always, nature plays a critical role in these tales, with countless references to grass, leaves, vines, trees, flowers, water, rocks, fog, and rain.
Highlights abound, but I particularly enjoyed the droning, religious lullabye of "Secrets Bound In Skin," with it's sitar-like accompaniment, Prydwyn's flute weaving circles around Renner's bouzouki on "Bless The Lily, Bless The Rose," and the unusual instrumentation (ektara, gopichand) that Renner employs on the navel-gazer, "Ephrata Sacred Heart," which is perfect for transcendental meditation with the transcendental medication of your choice. I'm also duly impressed with the manner in which he gets his "revelator guitar" to emulate a sitar on this and other tracks.
If you can get past Renner's toneless (and occasionally tuneless) vocals on the medley, "Midgard For A Dreamless Sleeper/The False Bird," you'll find another mesmerizing horror tale replete with worms, serpents, snakes and our hero literally kissing his ass goodbye, all culminating in Renner's vein-popping rant!
Throughout, Renner's typically deadpan vocals form an uncomfortable alliance with Sarada Hart's lilting soprano, imbuing these already somber tales with a dark, Halloween-y, late night vine. Never is this more evident than on his incantation in "The Hidden Heart," which invokes the spirit of Alastair Crowley in a seat-soiling séance conducted by Alfred Hitchcock. Like the similarly themed Ink Puddle Compound reviewed last month, Camera Obscura has given us two of the years Halloween soundtracks that you can enjoy year round and is infinitely more horrifying than the darkest images from Mel Gibson's imagination.
Yet Renner & Co. still manage to end on an upbeat note with the banjo-driven "Let The Towers Fall" and the a capella bonus track, "Arrowhead, Thorn, and Wasp-Sting," implying, perhaps, that there is still hope at the end of even the darkest tunnel. Perhaps this explains this final track's reversal of the opening track's title ["Wasp-Sting, Thorn, and Arrowhead"]? Stone Breath have reversed their fortunes, withstood the onslaught of religious persecution and mental anguish, and returned to the beginning of their journey, having "pressed seed to soil, felt the sharp kiss of thorns, and slept under a storm," euphemisms, perhaps for birth, life/love and death.
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