Almost all the press material I’ve read about this debut from Cross Record mentions how much it conjures up the spirit of nature. It’s an album recorded by a husband and wife who moved from Chicago to a Texas ranch two years ago. Considering how recent their relocation was, it’s impressive how quickly the couple acclimated to the beauties and brutalities of their new surroundings and incorporated it into their sound.
The first track comes in with an acoustic guitar trying to make its way through glitches and static. Remember all those creation sequences in Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life? That’s sort of how “The Curtains Part” comes off, too. Emily Cross’s breathy voice speaks into existence horns, rattlesnake percussion and strings as the song progresses. This isn’t post-rock so much as it is pre-rock. It’s creation, pure and simple, and it’d be a crime for us to name all the animals in Cross Record’s new world without them asking us to do it first.
There are returns to the formlessness of the opening track throughout the remainder of the album but most of the other songs follow more typical song structures. There are synth hooks, syncopated percussion and more calculated orchestration overall, but there’s still an air of shamanic mysticism permeating even the most accessible tracks here. Sometimes this comes across as quietly mysterious (“Two Rings,” “High Rise”), sometimes a slow build to epic measures (“Steady Waves,” “The Depths”) and even sometimes verging on the eerie and supernatural (“Basket,” “Wasp in a Jar”).
Thor Harris, most notably of Swans, contributes some percussion to the record and his presence makes for a fitting comparison. While Swans is a band far more sinister and comfortable with darkness, Cross Record shares with them a penchant for making music growing from the rhythms and moods of human life and the earth at large. It’s suggestive of its own necessity as a part of the natural world. If you’ve wondered what Swans’ To Be Kind would sound like by a peaceful campfire at dusk, rather than plunged into some murderous midnight, Wabi-Sabi can give you an idea while still creating a world all its own.
So yes, there’s a lot of nature here, a lot of sounds and vocals that sound like they could come out of the Northern Lights or some other earthly phenomena. The fact of the matter is that they didn’t though. They came from a married couple who’d just moved to a ranch in Texas from Chicago, and the album, as a whole, sounds like people coming to terms with city and country life both having their own sets of comforts and causes for paranoia.
Their first act of speaking something out of nothing is a definite success. You get the most authentic strains of modern folk songwriting with the instrumental tastefulness that makes up your favorite post-rock record. It’s sparse and lush all at once, and each listen reveals a different star in the night sky. There’s still room for them to move forward, but it’s a debut which ensures the listener there’s no way that won’t happen. Can’t afford the honest reflection and respite from the daily grind a Texas ranch could provide you? Cross Record is open for business and sounds like the best for the job this year.