WHAT RULES WEDNESDAY

The steady heart beating of the acoustic guitar sets to life this triumph. Denison Witmer  has always sung like leaves budding out of wintered branches. A curl of springtime returning in the warmth of sincerity molded through every word. “A House With” sings like the most gentle storybook. A desire for life to resonate in a home. It’s a blueprint of how to bring birds and plants nearer to working hands and turning minds.

Witmer slathers the simplicity of acoustic guitar and distant piano notes with dredges of background voices that weigh like soaking rain on the hood of a coat. It’s a coral reef teeming and glowing. The masses of voices sing along with Witmer as different plants and bird names are listed in choral form sound like a choir built from the items found on a walking trail.

The building of the drums unexpectedly drives to a mountain peak so gradually it’s as if the top of the mountain develops completely by old film and long vines. It’s a peak that doesn’t last long, but stays like moonlight before dawn.

The final 11 seconds of the song leave a single guitar turning seeds and vines in the soil for a solitary moment. After all of the growing sound fades, the patterned beats and masses of voice, it’s the singular shovel in the earth again that turns the volume back down. A place where the birds can safely stand on railings without a start. The silence of a flower blooming and no one even noticing.

Witmer tells this simple story with such a meaning in the sound of the instruments and voices, that these steps to grow hydrangeas or see a waxwing, sounds like the ultimate goal being achieved in a lifetime.

Witmer returning with this new album stands as a triumph on its own, as one of our greatest song crafters delivers more of the delicate trimming of leaves in the sound gives the type of additives that enrich soil and bring gentle life to gentle life.

(Asthmatic Kitty Records)

The whirring of thousands of aggravated insects starts as soon as the first second is in motion. Larson Ross cuts through the heave of guitar and bass melting into one formation. A crying out for buoyancy under the weight of oppressive walls leaning inward like a room collapsing. The drums are the only other sound that gives a point of light as to where to walk as the sound continues to engulf. It’s a cloth over the nose and mouth with some kind of ointment intending to heal, but breathing feels labored in this mode. The gentle shifting of a lead line on the guitar foams under the surface about 2/3rds through the song, but to hear it is to look past the song like seeing a collection of stars without a telescope.

Ross spins this planet for over two minutes with the crushing of an earth mover driving endlessly through fences and patterns and roadways and flocks of birds, and nothing stops it. There isn’t a moment to slow down, or breathe. The drum roll of a fill in the middle of the song is a mile marker but only that this metallic cloud is creeping lower like fog inside of fog.

The most interesting angle to the scourge of sound is how clear Larson’s vocals lay over the top of it all singing “I’ve been comfortable for way too long,” like it’s written in plain hand on the inside of a greeting card. A few lines of battling and debating before the continued angle of “I’m under compromise,” rolls on and on like a river that will eat the ocean.

It’s an exercise in expansion to the point of breaking without looking in any direction but directly at the edges ripping.

When’s the first moment of noticing a shifting toward getting sick. The moment that so subtly adds symptoms in to the day that started as normal as ever.

Or what’s it like to find the edge of a storm. The dividing line is somewhere where the snow is not falling but then it is falling right next to that.

Loraine James draws out a seemingly average sounding recording of footsteps and people talking like background paint with momentary sounds like a scrape on skin. The patterning of sound overtaking the beginning setting develops the way a panic attack sets in. Blips of fear tearing the ease of normalcy.

But this song grows in settled places. Long stretches of keyboard chords glowing and developing into lands without any buildings. The triumphant sound like royal horns played through broken speakers. The beat pacing like a hinge with a crick in the neck. The sweltering sound layers like coats over shirts over coats and then fades into the corners of a newly painted room.

There’s a movement like a lightbulb on a string swaying before an acoustic guitar and what sounds like a hand drum teaching a horse to walk, blows by with those same anxious copy machines stepping into view and out again.

A voice speaks the way a new spring of water would talk. Unidentifiably alive with a purpose but not easy to discover. And the voice trails off as the song does.

The way this song expands and collapses draws an arc before the sketch of a bridge. It’s an entire ecosystem as a map as a diagram in less than five minutes.

(Ghostly)