New Mexico, we have quietly pulled off the greatest coup since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: The band of the moment, recently signed to Matador Records, lauded in Spin, The New York Times,
and just about every other smarmy rag of record out there, Brightblack Morning Light has up and moved to the northern confines of our state, about an hour away from Santa Fe.
I recently spoke with BML's Nathan Shineywater, aka "Nabob," (his music partner is Rachael "Rabob" Hughes) and he informed me that a friend of his "who owns an organic restaurant" has just finished remodeling an adobe house, but can't move into it for another
year. So, he and Hughes are moving in to take care of it. There's your story-not a barnburner, but definitely in line with BML's meandering mythology (we'll get to that in a minute).
The move coincides with the release of BML's self-titled Matador debut, a moonshine-drenched album with the supple fluidity of a willow branch. Anchored by Hughes' Rhodes organ magic,
Brightblack Morning Light
is almost perfectly balanced: Vocals hover and groove like a friendly ghost. A subtle trombone weaves in, a secret detail barely revealed. The record's blueprint-it is clearly a well-planned affair-contains ethereal spaces that are filled sparingly. Melody is secondary to mood, a tricky formula that can sometimes fall flat, but here is parlayed to perfection.
BML is an ethereal wisp of a band, its true personality obscured by a hippie persona, based in reality but glorified into parody by media coverage and PR machines. In most photos, Shineywater has his shirt off, sporting long hair and a backwoods mustache, while Hughes floats in the background like a wood nymph. In one picture, the two are carefully cradling precious crystals in their hands, loopy smiles on their faces and silly hats on their heads. And take this bit from the band's self-written bio: "Brightblack Morning Light is a color of the day when the truth of the universe is faded into a veil of blue sky. It's a time when spirits are allowed access." Um, OK, but where are you from?
The facts, such as they can be gleaned, are these: Shineywater and Hughes grew up in rural Alabama and have been friends since. Freak folk predecessor Will Oldham took a liking to their music and took them on tour. They continued living the simple life, sleeping in tents and a cabin, scheduling tours around hot springs, eventually landing off the coastal highway, about an hour north of San Francisco, where they were lumped in with Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsome and other purveyors of freak folk, til Matador got their hands on 'em.
In my brief talk with Shineywater, there's no doubt the hippie label is accurate. His Southern drawl lilts out of the phone receiver on its own time, like a Southern belle out for a leisurely stroll. He's fresh out of Barton Springs, a natural cold springs in Austin that is a must-stop for the earthy set, and "yeah, man" peppers his speech. He makes a point of bringing up
issues
: "I've found with a lot of the folks I've talked to, everybody's kind of aware of the political state and environmental state," he says. "Too often, those subject matters are hard to include in cultural things. The places we're coming from lean themselves towards a dialogue about preservation of wilderness and those kinds of things."
Shineywater may have a tendency to live in the woods, but he is not a rube; clearly, this is a band more sophisticated than he and Hughes let on-after all, this is a group with a Myspace page just like anybody else. What complicates matters is the fact that BML has been stuffed awkwardly into the freak folk category.
Freak folk, the San Francisco-based movement led by Banhart and Newsome, among others, may have amorphous boundaries, but distinctions can be made. It's a genre that tilts toward the eccentric, extraordinarily basic (e.g., songs about spiders played on cheap mariachi guitars) and acoustic. BML may be eccentric, but their album is nuanced and thick with electrified bass, that gorgeous Rhodes, guitar and an obvious obsession with production. It has none of the tossed-off feel of the freak folk oeuvre; what it shares, perhaps, is musicians who claim to like to live in the wilderness (though, to my knowledge, Banhart lives in an apartment in San Francisco).
An even more noticeable difference is BML's influence by one of the least-folky bands to ever exist, My Bloody Valentine. MBV was a '90s band whose album
Loveless
took the layered, multi-guitar-slathered-over-ethereal-vocals sound to a whole new level.
Loveless
is a gorgeous, complicated album, but hippie-ish or earthy it is not. Yet, even though
Loveless
and
Brightblack Morning Light
could not be further apart, BML remains closely connected to it, and they are related in their own complications, like two moody brothers who happen to look very different. "I don't think it would be just to that influence to try to replicate it," Shineywater tells me. "But I think the similarities are that both records mingle with periphery in an interesting way."
Maybe that's the best way to sum up BML's interaction with the world. Shineywater and Hughes exist on the edges of a lot of things: forests, Santa Fe, the music industry. If you want to mingle in periphery yourself, catch them at the Santa Fe Brewing Company (7 pm, Wednesday, July 19. 35 Fire Place, 424-3333. $10.)-and you can say you saw them when…
