Brightblack Morning Light: Motion To Rejoin

On

its second album, Brightblack Morning Light leaves the lush greenery of

Northern California for a desert adobe in New Mexico. At first blush, there

isn't much to distinguish Motion To Rejoin—recorded in that mud hut using four

solar panels—from its eponymous predecessor. Well, aside from the fact

that there's less of it, just when it seemed like minimalist dubby folk

couldn't get any sparser. But even that's a distinction of note when discussing

a band whose connection with the natural world plays paramount in its

compositions. In songs like "Gathered Years" and "Summer Hoof," something

minutely slower and drier is happening, like a lone heat-wave coiling around

the fingers of Rachael Hughes as she sits at the Rhodes. There's also evidence

that main man Naybob Shineywater brought some of Humboldt's lush greenery with

him (one track is titled "When Beads Spell Power Leaf"), particularly when

things really get to wafting on soulful speakeasy drifters like "Oppressions

Each." Lazy saxophone exhalations, lightly swung beats, and female R&B;

backups answer for the southerly side of Motion To Rejoin's southwestern roots,

while that inescapable feeling of finding a way out of a listless hangover is

universal.