Review: Brazos' Phosphorescent Blues

Brazos’ debut LPs has been in the works for a while now. It’s been two years since principal member Martin Crane released the first EPs to fly the Brazos banner, A City Just as Tall and Feeding Frenzy, which he wrote and recorded entirely on his own. The fact that those EPs were essentially bedroom recording projects, coupled with the two year absence of any new material during which Crane assembled a (mostly) steady lineup for the band, may account for why Phosphorescent Blues is such a compelling departure from the original Brazos recordings. The album is beautifully recorded, and filled, for lack of a better phrase, with a kind of joyful nostalgia—both for the past and the future, if that’s even possible.

In a move that we’ll categorize as only minimally pretentious, the band lists the wide-open spaces of the South American altiplano as an influence. To their credit, the feeling the record creates corresponds to that image: many of the songs are perfectly spare; acoustic guitar, restrained piano flourishes, and the occasional woodwind doing more to suggest where music could be rather than spell everything out for us. Crane’s songs are strong enough to work with flexible arrangements, and in many cases are given plenty of room to breathe—the space that’s allowed to go unexpressed around the notes allows Crane and his sonorous voice the freedom to explore the melodies, which lope around with a graceful laziness not without purpose, and to focus on the lyrics, which are casual—but not tossed-off—reminiscences of both simple scenes from daily life, and more personal themes.

In more concrete terms, Phosphorescent Blues eschews the crunchy guitars of Brazos’ first recordings in favor of a much more refined but no less effective instrumentation, and the result is a record that has a breezy, summery quality that occasionally brings to mind Andrew Bird at his most mellifluous, or perhaps The Shins if they played bossa nova. All comparisons aside, Phosphorescent Blues is a defining, cohesive album for Brazos. The songs, instrumentation, and sequencing—the album is comprised of two undulating, hypnotic halves with the solo piano piece “Pues” dividing the two—all seem to have been delivered effortlessly. Ultimately, the album is more focused on creating a vibe than making any specific or complicated statement, and at that goal it succeeds admirably; it’s difficult to think of a finer album released in the genre by a local band this year.

Phosphorescent Blues is out November 10.

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