The Post-Rockist

“Bur Oak”
Bowerbirds
Danger at Sea

The Bowerbird’s website represents musical duo/couple Phil Moore and Beth Tacular as cozy in headspace, peaceful in spirit, and restful in soul, giving the impression that their music will mirror this life serene. The trees and grass, various birds, insects, and animals, the ocean and its daily occurrences all find places in the landscape of their songs. But the warbly vocal deliveries, jangling acoustic guitars, percussion that often sounds like spoons tapping on a wooden table, and chanting choruses and melodies belie themes that are both dark and mysterious.

The true spirit and soul of their songs call up a kind of desperation and claustrophobia of the self and offer to us an understanding of our destructive potential as humans. All of the songs on their self-released EP, Danger at Sea, may be composed of settings and metaphors from nature, but the songs do not take you to Walden Pond and its surrounding forest as much as they enclose about you the forest of Dante, where you are lost and cannot find your way.

“Bur Oak” is the most deceptive song on the EP. Moore, with Tacular doubling and harmonizing at various moments, delivers in the chorus a melody sweet and sweetly sung: —“Down by the bur oak tree / I had lost your locket in the loam, / And there fell to my knees, / neath the coil and the brush of the fern”. But the melody shrouds in euphony a desperate situation.

Bowerbird’s lyrics have a novelistic tendency, focusing intently upon seemingly small things in order to explore the gravity inherent in them. For example, in novels and in well-crafted songs, objects are extremely important and useful to the writer in expressing meaning. All objects carry with them meanings and connotations, in art and in our individual lives.

Among the many objects humans might own in life, a locket carries with it (or “in” it) intense meaning. It carries a picture or object of one you lost, of one you loved, or of one you remember. It is worn around your neck, hangs down into your shirt, hovers near your heart. To lose another’s locket is to lose for that person those memories; it is to lose another person. When Moore sings “There fell to my knees” he expresses visually what cannot be expressed in words: both the desperate attempt to recover what is lost and the utter dismay and sorrow that comes with losing something of another’s that is so precious.

And the eerie moaning and thumping of Beth Tacular’s accordion sends chills down my spine.

Yet the songs are so beautiful, the kind of music to which you must close your eyes and lie upon your floor to listen to, or with headphones lying on your back on the grass of a dewy field. That’s the miraculous thing about this EP: simultaneously it breaks and mends your heart.

–Posted by Scotter

If you like: acoustic music a la Devendra Banhardt or the softer songs of the Decemberists and M. Ward, you’ll really like the Bowerbirds.