CINDER WELL – A BLOOMING BODY: REVIEW
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CINDER WELL
A Blooming Body (Hen House Studios)
INTIMACY AND VASTNESS, the finer details observed but the space around them no less clear for its openness, is not just tricky to make work but potentially disconcerting to experience. If you are unsure where to ground yourself, or if you found a base but can’t be certain it is fixed, would you stay or look for an escape? And what I’m describing here is both musical and lyrical, sound and tone.
Some – many? – would say, I’m outtahere, dragging their coats behind them in their haste to find security, because like finding answers or seeing solutions to problems posed, certainty is more than a comfort, it’s a necessity. And can we really blame them? Indeed, are we any different or do we just tell ourselves we are while the question is merely theoretical?
“How do we know when it’s finished?”, asks the first song here in the way of those people:the ones who are watching a family fall apart or a house washed away or a tumbling disaster collect debris along the way rather than shedding burdens. Or someone not considered valuable enough to warrant much thought. Can there be an answer or any semblance of soothing in the way the song ends, “At some point we just stop” or is that, well, just an enforced, dispassionate or even indifferent break?
At this point I should tell you the name of this song, While The Womb Screams Silently, and that its story is that of a nameless, unimportant-to-those-who-are-important woman, “Milky bust and a half-smile/Hands crossed like they’ll never harm or pleasure”. She is the subject of a painting which is “To be shipped across the water in a crate/And hung up on a wall above a fireplace”, and it will count her for even less when that happens.
That’s how we’ll know it’s finished, maybe; not an end but a discontinuation of concern, a walk away from the heaviness of the piano that walks steadily, the flugelhorn that lays a path, the voice that arches its back but never raises its head above the swirl of space because there’s nothing to be gained, or lost, by doing so. It just goes on, until it stops.
So is it sensible for an artist to risk that discombobulation? Maybe not but that is what makes A Blooming Body, the fifth album from Amelia Baker as Cinder Well, so compelling an experience.
This is folk that may emanate from her home of Los Angeles but exists in the same island of clock-less/border-less atmosphere as Lisa O’Neill and, to a certain extent, Muireann Bradley, in Ireland, The Unthanks in Northumbria, and even a trace of John Cale, wherever he finds himself, especially in the spacious disturbance of The Color Of Earth. Natural elements rise and fall in the imagery, the subject matter does not fix at any point in history, and tempos are measured in years not hours. Its instrumentation – much of it played by the multi-instrumentalist Baker – is hardly bare, with viola, double bass, guitars and woodwind joining electronics, drums, and the horns and piano, but the fuller band sound that separates it from her previous records still never turns towards what you might call folk/rock and little feels heavy at any point.
Indeed, what heaviness there is, comes from the way the songs inhabit the space, much like the closest to any feeling of something more ancient is found in her voice’s straddling of keening and ambling rather than overt throws to older forms.
At least that is true for the first seven songs, for the album’s final track, the six minute-plus Shadows Of Leaves On Red Brick, is low, slow and accumulating spiritual weight the further it goes. Like the album’s opening, its closing ponders the uncertainty of what might be thought progression in a life or a relationship or a condition. Baker sings “I am all too aware of endings/Of goodbyes, of packing the suitcase/Lost items, too many to fit/Too heavy to carry through the doorway”, and the sense is of movement in stasis, a contradiction that makes more sense as you travel on.
For that is the essence of A Blooming Body, sense felt more than explained, in songs that stay like a shadow in the space around you.
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APPLE MUSIC: Listen to Cinder Well – The Blooming Body