The Boston-based folk duo Ballroom Thieves, aka Martin Earley and Calin Peters, check in with their fifth long player, a folk-flavored set accented by intertwined vocals, gorgeous harmonies, and songs that explore existential concerns.
Day jobs and side hustles, “likes” and tweets, outrage, disdain and divisions—some days the world seems stuck in a cycle of fast forward/repeat. Time flies but nothing changes. Except the clock’s hands tick forward as they always have and always will. A second begets a minute; the minute begets an hour; and on and on until a lifetime has passed. Change, too, is oft-difficult to see, though—unlike time—it doesn’t always tick ahead. In some instances, it folds back on itself like light in a black hole. Therein lies the rub.
On Sundust, Earley and Peters explore the “boring disaster” that is often life. Love for one’s self, love for another, forgiving all their trespasses—they’re more than lofty goals set forth by self-help books and the Bible. They’re the keys that unlock the secrets to contentment and happiness; rage and rancor otherwise rust the soul. As Earley sings in “Tender,” one of the set’s standout tracks, “Man, it gets hard to lay your anger down/And it gets hard to make a tender sound/And it gets harder keeping me around.”
As a whole, the album explores self-awareness, trauma and healing, aka those things impossible to encapsulate in a tweet. (And thank goodness for that!) It opens with “Everything Is Everything,” which finds Peters recalling life’s illusions before undergoing a “bittersweet awakening/that everything is everything.” Life writ large is what it is, the totality created by the collective. Life writ small is ours, alone. It’s what we recognize in others. “In the end I never knew you/in the end we’re all the same,” she sings, putting into words something we too often forget. (To quote the Beatles, “I am he as you are he as you are me.”)
Such esoteric concerns rarely translate well into song (beyond Van Morrison’s canon, of course) for the same reasons they can’t be captured in tweets. Yet the Ballroom Thieves do so time and again throughout the 10-track album. “Words,” for instance, opens with a simple observation (“Words come and go/like birds back and forth/You and I are getting older all the time”) before exploring the woven threads that make life complete. (As Earley jokes in “Time Just Falls Apart,” they’re “high on metaphors.” I often am, too.) “Boring Disaster,” for its part, injects some humor into the proceedings while asserting “life is too brief to fall in love with anything.” (Earley, who takes lead on the song, doth protest too much, methinks.) Trust me when I say there are far worse things than spending a year—or even a lifetime—in New Hampshire!
In short, Sundust is a tuneful treatise on the existential concerns pandemic life brought to the fore. It’s well worth one’s time.
The Old Grey Cat 