Continuing our new column, wherein we review every last bit of new vinyl that gets sent to us. Vinyl is cool! We play it, listen to it, write about it, love it.

MP3:
The Golden Bears – This Golden Afternoon

The Golden Bears are Julianna Bright and Seth Lorinczi, and Wall to Wall is their first full-length record. It’s out now on Amore!Phonics (Viva Voce’s label) and tonight is the album release show at the Doug Fir. Notice I said “album release,” and not “CD release.” Wall to Wall is currently only available on vinyl and as a download. (If you buy the vinyl, it comes with a coupon for the mp3 download version, or you can just buy the download on its own at iTunes.) And it’s a gorgeous record, perfectly suited to the vinyl format, with Bright’s absolutely charming cover art and twelve short songs that add up to something greater than the sum of their parts. Songs flow in and out of each other, motifs are introduced, indulged and expanded upon; the result is divided up amongst two sides that are, in some ways, mirror reflections of each other. Bright and Lorinczi recorded the album in their home last year while expecting their first child, but it’s scarcely the cuddly, pillow-talking bathwater you’d expect from such origins. No, at times it unabashedly rocks; metal riffs creep into folk songs, drum fills clatter and thrash, and the lyrics suggest loads of meaning while explicitly saying very little. The album embraces the strangeness of dreams, the comfort of domesticity, the reassurance of love, the fear of the unknown, and the wide-eyed wonder of childhood imagination. It’s breathtakingly good.

Opening with the bolero waltz of “Tall Ships,” the Golden Bears immediately sound as graceful and misty as Liege & Lief-era Fairport Convention. There’s a beefier sound to the guitars, but it’s timeless: the year could be 1969, or 1369… or 2008, I suppose. The lyrics are abstractly impressionistic, a vague sketch of a ship embarking on a journey, and while it is clearly a beginning, it also very much sounds like a departure, a goodbye. There was a time when getting onboard a ship and leaving the shore meant there was a very good chance you’d never return. “Gulls cry, ‘to sea, to sea,’” Bright sings, and by the end of the song, we think we hear the gulls… but no. It’s just a recording of garden birds outside the Bears’ window. They are safe at home, writing and drawing and recording, and we are safe, too, traveling with them via armchair and headphones. Soon we are sailing on the literal “Coda,” and the landscape shifts to soft dreamlike piano and cascading “la la las.”

“This Golden Afternoon” (MP3 above) takes a simple stoner riff and creates a heavy pop song that’s both ominous and peppy. It’s quite a balancing act, and things take a darker turn when the drums drop out for Bright to warn, “We don’t go outside with the demons of ours.” But it's just campfire ghost-storytelling, with a flashlight shined spookily under the face; the song really means to captures the joy of life at home and the thrill of having a killer recording studio in your basement. Life is good, and isn’t it fun to play pretend?

The title track grabs ahold of a vaguely Middle Eastern guitar riff while riding a choppy, corkscrew beat; soon, a cello interlude leads into the straightforward instrumental motif of “Our Progress.” The progress is soon hampered by progressive-rock drum fills, and it eventually turns into a free jazz jam with saxophone by Evolutionary Jass Band’s Jef Brown. Are we making progress, or are we lost? Where's the map? Whose idea was it to go so far west, anyway? But before panic sets in, Side One closes with a piano ballad that perhaps feels a bit too ordinary to be sitting alongside the spooky, brain-scraping music that preceded it. The song works like a salve, in spurts, but the chorus plods and the vocal overdubs are laid on a touch thick.

Side Two, however, quickly returns us to where we last lost sight of our bearings, and we are happily scrambled again, as sitar drones quickly encompass us like the action described in the lyrics:

“When the roots beneath your house come crowning through the floor… lay your body down… and trade your famined thoughts for leaves and vines instead.”

We are immediately thrust back into another progressive jam, and a triplet figure circles and descends upon us like angry vultures.

Things continue with a pair of pleasantly intricate pop songs, “We Choose” and “Geography,” and soon we are making “Further Progress,” another instrumental piece that sounds like something chanted to accompany a sacrificial offering, albeit with a thumping backbeat. “Tracery of Branches” has perhaps the most to say of any song on the record: Poetic turns of phrase and strings of images collect like buds at the tip of a tree branch. The song, backed by unadorned acoustic guitar, seems to be about the passing of things—knowledge, love, art, life—from generation to generation, and how that miraculous, inevitable transference is initiated by two strangers, courageously (and perhaps foolishly) deciding making contact with one another. With any luck, love is the result, and everything else comes from that. The album concludes with “You and All the Other Humans Like You,” an appropriate ode to an unborn, or just-born, child. A pastoral organ joins in to close the record on a hopeful, soothing note.

The Golden Bears have really done something magical here, and I admit Wall to Wall touches me on a personal level. It gives me the same feeling as looking through a shelf of my granddad's old books, like something left behind for posterity. Bright's pregnancy most likely informed this element--the Bears were singing and playing to an unborn child, and there's a sense of foreboding throughout, but the fear is coupled an infinitely optimistic sense of possibility. The storybook artwork is icing on the cake; Bright's cover design is naive and grotesque, in the original sense of the word (from the Latin root grotto, deriving its meaning from paintings found on the wall of prehistoric caves, often of mythological figures that had both human and animal parts. The only interruption to Bright's wonderful illustrations is a mundane photo of their studio setup in the inner gatefold--it breaks the spell a little.) Some could complain about the vagueness of the Bears' lyrics, that they are needlessly poetic and not direct enough. But I found enough substance to be nourished by them, and they left enough room for me to project my personal thoughts and interpretations. Lorinczi and Bright's playing is excellent throughout--circular and riffy, with runs, dynamics and subtlety. It's my hope that this vinyl copy of Wall to Wall will be left behind for my grandkids to discover on a shelf one day. I'm pretty certain record players will still be around then. Not so sure about CDs.

The Golden Bears play tonight, April 3, at the Doug Fir with Holcombe Waller & the Healers and Tom Brosseau; 830 E Burnside, 9 pm, $10. Meanwhile, You can listen to more of Wall to Wall at the Golden Bears' MySpace page, and you can buy it here.

Remember, End Hits loves vinyl! If you’re a label or a band, send us your new vinyl for review. We’ll listen to it and put our thoughts up on the blog. Send it to:
Portland Mercury
Attn: End Hits
605 NE 21st Ave., Suite 200
Portland, OR 97232