Brightblack Morning Light – Motion To Rejoin

Motion To Rejoin is the second album for Matador by Brightblack Morning Light, the core duo of Rachael Hughes and Naybob Shineywater are heavily into Native American and psychedelic imagery, like something out of the 70s, they give off a hippy gone wrong stoner vibe. It’s no surprise, then, to learn that they recorded this album in the New Mexico wilderness, in just a shack with power that runs on solar panels, thus the recording was dictated by the amount of sun and the time of day. This conceptual stuff seems a bit ripe, but if you throw off initial reactions and listen to the album you find it not quite as you might expect.

It is fucking excruciating. They show expert control in long organ sounds, repeating the same riffs over and over, subtle xylophone dots, watery horns, barely there guitar and ever-so-slightly brushed cymbals, it’s an extremely admirable performance, never once do they really cut loose. There’s no folk here, just blues, jazz, soul, r’n’b and funk, despite all the trappings of a ‘freak’ folk band, they mine different veins, which is really refreshing. ‘A Rainbow Aims’ is like a soul song put through a mangle, flattened and elongated and thin as a biscuit, I’m sure if you sped it up you would get a riotous track that sounds like Otis Redding’s ‘Hard To Handle’, but as it is you get inky Fender Rhodes, long horn notes, twinkling guitar and jazzy bass. ‘Hologram Buffalo’ is a funky blues number, yet again the horns, guitar and that damned tasty Fender play it slow, but we get an accentuated beat, and some blues guitar chords. ‘Summer Hoof’ brings out the jazz, horns wandering the backstreets of late night Chicago, swampy recording quality, cymbal simmering, drum blurs, and again the Fender leading the way through the middle of the song. ‘Oppressions Each’ kills, with jazzy piano, deep bass, an addictive two-note horn bit, and some soulful gospel styled singing, the most overtly melodious singing to be found on the album in fact. Shineywater gets his groove on and some blurred female backing vocals join him in singing ‘You don’t need oppression/Nobody wants oppression’ all hippyish and Vietnam evoking, even this song is at a stately pace, the last minute or so picks up a bit with slightly busier tapped percussion, but it’s still damn slow.

I can imagine Naybob Shinywater running around the desert at midnight like a goon, with antlers strapped to his head and completely off his tits on drugs. That’s all good, but it’s just as well that Hughes is there with her genuine 1979 Fender Rhodes to plough the direction of each song, the instrument’s utterly sublime tone adds real authenticity to the soul, blues, jazz melange. So it’s excruciating, especially with the last three songs where it doesn’t feel like the album will ever end, but there’s a lot to like and a lot that hooks you into playing Motion To Rejoin again and again.
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Brightblack Morning Light on MySpace