On Big Big Motion, Abbey Blackwell expands her sound while retaining the intimacy of her 2023 solo debut, My Maze. That set often sounded like she was singing her poetic thoughts and observations into your ear. This one finds her sitting on the floor across the room, acoustic guitar or bass cradled in her lap, while the band (Ronan Delisle on electric guitar, Stephan Moore on keyboards, and Evan Woodle on drums) behind her provides subtle support.
It opens with “Wind Watching,” a stark confession initially buttressed by minimal backing: “Sometimes I find/I’ve lost my mind/wind watching while I see nothing….” The space between notes is as important as the notes themselves, with the reverberations of chords resonating like gentle waves lapping ashore one after the next. As the song develops, however, the waves expand in size and intensity. “Less Breath,” on the other hand, expands and contracts somewhat like a broken heart; Delisle’s electric guitar, in this metaphor, serves as a defibrillator returning it to a normal rhythm. Or something like that.
The uncluttered approach includes Blackwell’s lyrics, as well, which excise unnecessary verbiage and purple prose in favor of a simple and direct approach. “You gave me your time/and I lost it with mine,” she confides in “Lost It,” while “Think I’ll Know It” revisits the anxiety she experienced on a tour that found her suffering from daily nosebleeds.
The gentle “River or a Road,” on the other hand, is a philosophical treatise about being apart from our loved ones. In a press release, she explains, “I was putting into words my (albeit facile) realization that when we are apart from our loved ones, we are only left with the words and images they’ve scattered around us. And they’re only left with what we have given them. Hopefully it was something worthwhile and positive for us to turn over again and again like a polished stone, reexamining in the light.” The brief “Big Motion” belies its title by honing in on the mundane nature of life; it reminds me somewhat of the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip that finds little Calvin staring at the many stars in the night sky. “When you look into infinity,” he muses, “you realize that there are more important things than what people do all day.”
Many of the songs delve into the seemingly elastic nature of time, with some moments feeling as if they’ll never end and others over in the blink of an eye. Yet time is a constant, ticking forth at the same clip regardless of our perceptions.
“Caught a Glimpse” ups the electric current; it finds Blackwell dreaming “of another time and space” while attempting to live a mindful life. “A Note to Myself,” for its part, embraces a tempered pace that flowers into jazz-like ambience by song’s end; it’s quite cool. “Next Time,” which I featured upon its release as a single in early August, is—as I said then—“a compact rock tune that plays havoc with the existential concerns surrounding time, memory and identity, and—as if that’s not enough—features a guttural guitar solo, too.”
The album closes with “Bye for Now,” a sparse instrumental that lingers longer than its minute-fifty length. It’s quite cool.
As a whole, as I noted in my “Next Time” piece, the album “is a remarkably fluid set that’s accented by open space, a relaxed pace and the apparition that is time. In short, she explores—to borrow a few phrases from Wallace Stevens—the ‘blessed rage for order’ via ‘ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.’” I’ll go further and reference another poet, another poem—Carolyn Kizer and “Complex Autumnal”:
All things begin together: Weather and love. The ear Hears the earth turn; we make an adjustment To that motion: the dip of the sphere Into autumn, and rustling music As the leaves are shaken away…
Autumn is a time of both transition and reflection, when many contemplate the passage of yet another year and recognize that winter—and all that it represents—is near. Big Big Motion is a perfect soundtrack for such existential ruminations.
The Old Grey Cat 
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