At this show, I was excited by the possibility of seeing them at all, and curious as to whether their distinctive sound could be reproduced even in as intimate a setting as LPR's.
Although Brightblack Morning Light's music is characterized by its slow pace—indeed, it's difficult to imagine a band so accepting of pop conventions and instrumentation playing any slower than they do—they are hardly easy listening. At least superficially, their gospel and folk-influenced compositions are predictable and straightforward. Almost none of their songs have solos or bridges, and vocal reverb is so high on most of their studio work that their lyrics are barely a factor in understanding their songs. Their music never seems to be building towards anything, and very little of it does: formally, a BBML song will consist of a single, repetitive synth line augmenting a wandering rhythm guitar whose monitors are on frustratingly low. There will be reverberating vocals and contributions from difficult-to-identify brass instruments, but nothing in the way of choruses, verses or other immediately obvious formal reference points. This makes their work soothing and purposeless enough to qualify as stoner music—perhaps even ideal stoner music. But a more engaged listen reveals their music to be simultaneously more typical and more confrontational than its apparent sonic and formal simplicity would suggest.
BBML's self-titled first album included songs that were easily classifiable. "Everybody Daylight" was a catchy, R&B-influenced jam formed around a single, repetitive and virtually unchanging beat; with pretty standard instrumentation, a consistent melody and uncompromising tonality (unlike in other genre experiments in jazz and R&B, which often lose tonality altogether), it was, on its surface, wnothing but a pop song played incredibly slowly.
Of course, the latter part of that statement reveals something of a philosophical gap between the typical pop musician and a group like BBML. "Everybody Daylight's" accessibility was self-consciously deflective: Those drawn in by the beat might not appreciate that the lyrics are indecipherable, that the instruments are sometimes indistinguishable, that there is a flute that sporadically and faintly screeches away in the background, or that the synthesizer has a tendency to flirt with momentary instrumental flourishes before once again adhering to a single, unchanging beat. These are intricacies that would not be as obvious if the band chose to fully embrace pop conventions. Yet the fact that they are at all different or musically interesting owes to the band's fascination with seemingly primordial genres of American music: R&B, southern folk, jazz and gospel. On their most recent album, this year's Motion to Rejoin, the band's sound is even slower and even more obscured, and their project of stripping classic "American" music down to its fundamentals and building something wandering and, for the most part, incredibly weird in its place continues. It's clear from their latest work that BBML has no desire to be a pop band, or to write straightforward, Copeland-style tributes to prevalent national art forms.
Any musically different or interesting band—particularly one whose work is actually getting less conventional—invites a certain set of expectations for their live act. But with BBML, the intuitive question of "how much will they sound like a normal band?" was joined by the more specialized question of whether they would sound like anything at all. Before their concert, I feared that a band as slow and as quiet as BBML would be reduced to a whispery jumble in a club setting, particularly given the deceptively complex and nuanced nature of their music. However, their live show evoked and at times even reproduced the various musical tensions that make their music so interesting. The band's brass section—which included a saxophone, a trombone and a trumpet—was so soft in volume and generally unassuming that it was sometimes difficult to tell whether they were playing at all, a fact that gave their overall sound the same disorienting quality that drives its studio material. The vocal reverb sounded like it was up as high as it would possibly go, and the band's few familiar lyrics were blurred beyond any definite recognition. Meanwhile, lead guitar player Nathan Shineywater would occasionally strum a few low-decibel chords that could barely be heard over Rachel Hugh's keyboard. It looked like Shineywater was stationed behind a synthesizer or mixing board—he wasn't playing guitar for most of the show, although what he actually was doing is anyone's guess. A permanent cloud of machine-generated fog added to the general aesthetic confusion.
This show was a sonic morass, but this was not entirely a bad thing (although it might have turned off concertgoers unfamiliar with the band's music). For one thing, the aural fog was not nearly thick enough to cloud out the complex background instrumentals that prevent the BBML's music from being as narcoleptic as it could (and arguably should) be. I could still tell that set-opener "Hologram Buffalo" was still barely being held together by the slow, polyphonic interplay between a pair of meandering synth lines. Longer instrumental pieces sounded a bit more muddled until I moved closer to the stage, where it was clear that the BBML had not dismissed the possibility of conveying the full complexity of their sound in a live setting. This was a crucial creative choice in its own right. It is easy for a more experimental rock act to crank up their bass or vocal monitors in order to aim for a safer, more coherent sound that eliminates some of the risk of live performance. There is always the chance that an aesthetic as unique as the BBML's simply can't work live, but aside from the unnaturally echoing vocals, they made no overly-obvious attempts at playing it safe.
Set-closer "Oppression" revealed the BBML's success in parlaying potential confusion into a show that brought out everything that makes them so idiosyncratic and even radical. Slightly louder and faster than everything else in their oeuvre, the song is driven by its heavier-than-normal brass instrumentation and a whispered chorus that sounds like it could have been lifted from any number of classic Motown records. The song's R&B roots were as apparent as the musical elements undermining such a straightforward interpretation of their music. Live, BBML managed to be cloudy and mysterious without losing any of their music distinctiveness. Their sound is as jarringly strange and defiantly inexplicable live as it is on their albums, and while the concert offered no new insights into their music, it was an excellent demonstration of an innovative band successfully conveying their musical idiosyncrasies in a live setting.
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