Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
June is near. And as we crack our doors and meekly peer out the narrow opening, daring to hope for a little climatic perfection to kick off the summer(i.e. no more frost advisories), who should be there to greet us but a brand new EP by Amble Down standby We Are the Willows?
Places, like most proper summer EPs, is first and foremost an invitation to relax. Even though the songs radiate furtive emotion, the music has a yogi-sluggishness about it that, combined with simplicity of story telling in the lyrics, pushes the song’s emotional content a few miles towards the horizon. In each track the scenes play out at a distance, cloaked in blurry white halo of fantasy.
Willows comes equipped with a string section that, despite a string section’s classical associations, manages to add to the seductive, exotic flavor of the music. They bend and slide lazily like a young women on a beach, made sleepy by the heat, slowly stretching in the sun.
The music maintains a whimsical quality even in its more urgent moments, as in the EP’s single “Somewhere, Virginia.” Here the insistent shuffle of the snare and minor key evoke the angst of a young man driving across the country compelled by thoughts of his far-away mate. And he’s undaunted by the unlikelihood that he will reach her, he’s content just to be heading in her general direction. The urgency in the music highlights the irrational resolve of a young person in love.
The closing track is a cover of “Microphone Ghost,” by EC favorites Laarks. The choice to end with a cover is not only a wonderful expression of the sentiments expressed in the song itself, but also a wonderful resolution to the journey Places undertakes with each of its tracks: to explore the way that feelings of love and companionship condition a person’s idea of place. Places shows how these things seem to mix seamlessly in the human mind: we can’t escape our desire for community so we might as well embrace it.
All that aside, Places is a wonderful escape: full of meaning but never troubling. And best listened to in the sun.
1 comment
WILLOW! « Goodbyepagoda says:
Oct 13, 2011
[...] If you haven’t heard Peter Michael Miller (aka We are the Willows) you are missing out! Pete has had a very busy summer finishing up his across country tour where I had chance to catch him at a small coffee shop in Long Beach, CA! He also just released his 4th album called “Places”. The album is described in one review has “a wonderful escape: full of meaning but never troubling. And best listened to in the sun.” To read the rest of the review click here. [...]