Austinist Album Review: Balmorhea's Rivers Arms

If you're not familiar with the industrious Balmorhea-ns, you're doing yourself a grave disservice, and, frankly, need to get in touch with the scene. The music is vast, yet meticulously restrained: melancholy, determined pianos slowly upended by cellos, soft-spoken conversations between two acoustic guitars, and distant, inscrutable audio samples that elaborate on what each piece seems to urgently chronicle. Without question, it is an impassioned narrative that binds these songs together, yet never too tightly. Unlike the solipsistic pretensions that mark a host of other brooding instrumentalists in their vein, Balmorhea's arrangements leave enough space inside themselves for a listener to walk directly up and put their ear up to the beating heart at their core. Because of this compulsion to invitation, Rivers Arms is steeped in a disarming once-removed nostalgia; a feeling of having visited a long-abandoned dwelling, catching glimpses of the former inhabitants as phantoms in one's peripheral vision.

On "Greyish Tapering Ash" it's difficult to decide if the sound of trains in the background are carrying someone away from where they want to be or towards it. "Baleen Morning" is gorgeous, a slow dawning realization, like waking up to a lover's face half-buried in the sheets embossed by the cold light of a final reunion. Soundscapes like "Context" bleed in to the series, culminating in distant orchestras and church bells; punctuating the album with provocative foreshadowing, but revealing little. As the album winds down into a reprise of the title track "San Solomon", there is much to ruminate upon and return to.

Their first, self-titled album waded out into the tepid waters of low-key indie and made some significant ripples. Now, having easily caught the attention of the bellwether bloggers and tiny-tee'd taste-makers, their new offering is poised to go a long way in solidifying their burgeoning legacy. Austinist couldn't be prouder.

[Balmorhea Myspace][Official]