Hush Arbors - Under Bent Limb Trees
(Digitalis)
Sometimes a name is just a name, but when yours is Keith Wood, singing odes to the forest may well be your destiny. Naming your band Hush Arbors does little more than seal this fate. Hush Arbor’s new release Under Bent Limb Trees explores the many facets of nature – the warmth of a hazy sunny summer day, the angry tumult of a storm, and the enclosing menace of kudzu cover. Wood’s Nature is not only worthy of our admiration but also our respect and awe. It is a beguiling mixture of delicate seductive sun-washed days and grim, steely, claustrophobic blackness.
Under Bent Limb Trees is Hush Arbors’ first non-CDR release. It seems that the move to a slightly more permanent medium has had an impact. Wood’s vocals, which have wavered with frail beauty on previous efforts, are more assured and commanding here. The arrangements (all instruments are played by Wood himself with a few guest spots) provide sympathetic support and offer a muscular counterpoint to any remaining vocal frailty. Fans of Jewelled Antler releases will find themselves in familiar territory, but Wood tends to favor smaller and more enclosed spaces for his recordings. This gives Hush Arbors a more immediate and intimate sound than the signature reverberant chambers of Thuja.
For all of its intimacy, thematically Under Bent Limb Trees is quite ambitious. It describes two life cycles. The songs follow the progress of the seasons from the winter storms of “Spirits Over Mt. Blanca” through the spring and summer of “Where the Black Bear Hides in the Sky” and “May All Your Pastures Spring With Herbs” into the starkly autumnal “Song for Morning to Sing” and coming full circle with the icy drone of “Kudzu Covered Maples.” The second cycle is that of human life. Wood is not the first to draw a parallel between the human and year’s seasons, and the songs he has penned for Under Bent Limb Trees tells a story from the view of an imagined protagonist about how people live within the arc of seasonal modulations.
In “Spirits Over Mt. Blanca”, wind, and rain saturate the microphone while gently insistent feedback hovers in the background. This is our genesis, born from the clouds in a burst of thunder. It is a birth that nods to the mythic status of Mt. Olympus yet remains as personal and mundane as a rainstorm. Upon the descent for Mt. Blanca, “The Forest We’ve Been” draws the connection between the people and the land / forest. The title itself connects humanity with the woods in an unbroken line. In the narrative of the disc, it is the emergence of human life from its sylvan crucible. Wood’s guitar and voice form a stately procession that treads as lightly as if it were borne along on a carpet of fragrant pine needles out of the forest.
Next, Wood employs banjo, violin, and woodwinds to give “Wooded Reel” a vaguely Eastern European sound reminiscent of Steven R. Smith’s Hala Strana project. The pace of this piece is as leisurely as the melting ice it seems to emulate. In “Where the Black Bear Hides in the Sky”, Wood has created a timeless folk song out of a swaying banjo, violin and hovering vocals. It proves he is just as adept at channeling the relatively recent human musical traditions that inhabit Appalachia as he is at evoking the soul of the ancient mountainous landscape itself. This is a spring song and it celebrates the birth of a relationship both with the newly fertile land and with the lover that the singer will soon join in matrimony.
Spring passes into summer with the muscular strum and strangled feedback of “May All Your Pastures Spring With Herbs”. One can almost feel the tender new shoots of grass underfoot as the lyrics speak of shedding pain and grief for the spiritual rebirth that only a fecund Earth can provide. For “Gypsy Wood”, Sean Witzmann and Jeremy Freeze join Wood as the assembled company gathers under the sheltering branches of a tree to sing an ode to the full glory of the lazy haze of summer.
A chill starts to creep into the air during a “Song for Morning to Sing” where a delicate lattice of banjo and guitar barely cradles Wood’s naked voice out in front of the music on the disc for the first time. The lyrics tell of the minute joys (sun through clouds, breeze over water) of daily life as if the singer is looking back on them with wistful nostalgia. Gently echoed acoustic guitar and a swimming organ accompany a multitude of recorded insects and other animals in “Dark Mist Curtains in the Doorway”. The vocals so up front in the previous song are now reduced to a shadowy footnote as the singer prepares to surrender to his final rest.
“Kudzu Covered Maples” finishes the disc with a twelve-minute claustrophobic instrumental drone ushered in by field recordings of crickets and birds only to be increasingly overtaken by a lurking menace as more and more sounds are layered on to cover any light that might have seeped in from the earlier tracks. This is the bone-chilling, visceral passage of time that reminds us that ultimately the warm glow of the earlier seasons must sink back into darkness from whence they came in order to emerge revitalized. Listeners willing to explore the depths Wood lays out can expect to emerge similarly revitalized from Under Bent Limb Trees.
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