I’m riding the tram, it’s freezing cold outside and the heating system is turned on at maximum power, breathing vapors of hot steam through the heaters next to the seats. Soon, the tram’s car will be filled with this hot fume that pierces through the air making little fluffy cotton-candy-like vapor as it comes out, like a sewer’s haze in a dark cold alley, slowly leaving its trace in the sky.
I’m sitting quite close to the heaters and I realize there’s also a sound coming from the heater slots. As the steam meets the cold air it makes a gentle sound, almost like a humming. I can hear a voice coming from down there, singing:
Everybody come to know
In death, to believe
In something better
, In something better
, There's no fear.
These words stuck to my head so later at home I googled it and found it’s from “Everybody Daylight”, a track from a band called Brightblack Morning Light, featured on their eponymous album.
This album kicks it off with a track that sets the mood for the whole piece: mellow, apparently slow and slightly unraveled, but quite lively inside and with a couple of hidden surprises, like the drop of the trumpets in “Star Blanket River Child”. I love this album for its complete and assumed experience, sliding from one track to the other with a seamless cross-fade, as if each track reveals itself from behind the see-through veil of the previous track. It’s an ongoing story and each song adds its piece to the puzzle.
The album has a great rhythm, that drumming (flavored with some congas and spiced with flutes) will probably make you wanna start taking drum lessons, or at least make you tap your foot hard down to the floor. The singing sets the mood just about right and shapes the whole thing better. Sometimes the melodies infiltrate so well in your ears that they even manage to change your perspective of the surroundings - for a few minutes everyone riding the tram along with me seemed to be thinking and listening to the same sounds and sometimes humming a bit also.
The whole album breathes morning light with a certain young freshness. Some songs, like “Amber Canyon Magik”, sound like a reverie, like your gliding in slow motion on a water slide. Other songs seem to drift endlessly in a bottomless post game-over plain (it’s not that bad really).
I’m not sure whether it’s one track too long or not, but I’d definitely take this album with me on a solitary train ride through the Rocky Mountains.
Tracklist:
1. Everybody Daylight2. Friend Of Time
3. Fry Bread
4. Star Blanket River Child
5. All We Have Broken Shines
6. A River Could Be Loved
7. Amber Canyon Magik
8. Black Feather Wishes Rise
9. Come Another Rain Down
10. We Share Our Blanket With The Owl