Beginnings are things that can be imagined, but almost never witnessed by the subject. Anyone who can remember their own birth is the exception. Music is a thing, albeit an abstraction of the word things to include ideas and other things that tend to slip through fingers when they are grasped too firmly. Music is surely elusive, not something that can be picked up by just anybody at any given moment. Music takes time, is time, and can grow and build only with time. Sophisticated music cannot be coaxed into being at an instant, but must start at humble beginnings. It can be imagined that State Bird's Marching Thru The Wilderness is like these humble beginnings.

State Bird has a dynamic that has now become somewhat antiquated. Much music today is heavily populated with incredible polyrhytms and chance harmonies that are organized to reach a climax. Current day music also tends to be secular in nature, keeping ideas of God with a capital `G' confined to a single line of lyrics. This of course is not universal, but a general trend. State Bird does not seem opposed to this general trend, but are instead are going back to an imagined beginning. Marching Thru The Wilderness is music, simply.

State Bird, instead of creating a large variety of sounds by wrapping melodies together, tightly layered and packaged nicely within the 0:00 and -0:00 marks, uses the numerous instruments that lay at their disposal to make new music. This music that operates in the tight space of a very simplistic rhythm and varies the accent of sound that is present in every instrument to create something like metrical verse, returning to a classical realm of poetry and music that certain hasn't passed since State Bird exhibits these qualities, but has commonly been thought to have been explored thoroughly, and that the freedom of in such a structure is sparse, seen by some to only have freedom in the space between the bars it uses to cage its practicioners. State Bird must see something else in this form though, a beauty that is subtle and homey and joyous like the return of the prodigal son. State Bird, in its many Christian references and its aforementioned form, presents music like prayers that are admirable in their self-restraint, but similarly are praiseworthy in their ability to let that restraint go for little moments and not be drawn into the freedom like a tempestuous night inundated with a whirlpool of drinking and fucking. State Bird produces music that is totally in control of itself, shows it, and tests it.

Similar Albums:
Annuals - Be He Me
Sufjan Stevens - A Sun Came
Danielson - Ships

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Paul Bozzo
01.17.2007