“I can’t quite catch the rhythm of days I moved well to in other winters.” It’s not my line, I hasten to add, but borrowed from the second Denise Levertov poem titled “Intimidation”; thus the quotes. Cold and rain, cold and snow, cold and cold; at a certain juncture, we tread slower across the cracked asphalt and sidewalks, worried that a fall might dislodge our soul. Age brings with it more than caution, however.
The Bird Calls, aka singer-songwriter (and Pitchfork contributor) Sam Sodomsky, isn’t old, per se, but he’s been in the game longer than most, releasing near 40 albums (!) since 2011. Since last year’s outing, Old Faithful, he began thumbing through poetry tomes and, too, composing poems of his own, with an eye to improving his wordsmith ways. He also asked producer and multi-instrumentalist Ryan Weiner, who has a knack for crafting spacey pop, for help translating his new songs into something more than folk-flavored odes.
The result is an album that conjures the soft-rock sounds of the 1970s—folky, for sure, but colored with pop and rock flourishes. The opening “God Bless These Days” is a good example, blending elements with bluegrass with impressionistic introspection: “And in that bar there was a glass/That touched her lips when I saw her last/Big bubble letters in the clouds spell out/The words I’d say if I knew her now/On a street where there’s always construction/I’ve been carving nothing out of something.”
In short, it’s the sound of a man entering middle age with the very doubts that, time to time, nag most of us from our 30s on. (I.e., to lift the question posed by Bruce Springsteen in “The River,” “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true/or is it something worse?” Or, to use the line he borrowed from the Stones, “What a drag it is getting old.”) “Critic Meets Artist” and “I Don’t Want to Be a Cowboy Anymore,” among others, find him dealing with dreams that seem more distant than when he was young. Compounding the matter: loneliness, one-off romances, and—as he delineates in “Butterfly Strokes Home” and the title track—plenty of regrets.
Self-excavation is not an easy task. We look back, judge ourselves and others, and slowly realize that we were never meteors streaking across the night sky but asteroids circling the sun for millennia and a day. When phrased just so and paired to the infectious melodies and rhythms, however, such observations reveal to the listener that they’re not alone. Such is the case with Melody Trail by The Bird Calls. It’s a strong album that digs into the grist of life with aplomb.
The Old Grey Cat 