- Welcome to Daytrotter
- Gentle Beast
- Fright of Thee
- Lost In The Dark
- Glowing Mouth
We’re safe here in this outdoor ballroom that Milagres has created. They’ve put down the floor, covering up the fallen branches and the tracks of animals that have surely been eaten since they last passed through these parts. It’s a good, solid floor and the night light strikes it just right. The air seems frozen in its place, not too warm and not too cool, but a temperature that we find that we can get lost in. We begin to twirl and spin, thinking about what our feet are doing, trying to make them not fuck up, when it’s all that they want to do. They can’t help themselves sometimes and we don’t hold it against them as they’re only feet, just padded stumps with toe knuckles, tiny bits of hair for the men and soft, beautiful arches for the women that we use to get around on. The Brooklyn band sure knows how to make a space and a night feel elegant. We listen to the group’s latest album, “Glowing Mouth,” and it’s like instead of being lit from the insides by a 60-watt bulb, we’ve just screwed something in the ballpark of 100 watts into our socket and we feel as if our skin’s getting hot with brilliance. We see the majestic night for what it means to us right now. There are mink and raccoons running around, owls eying mice from their treetop perches before swooping in for the morsels. The air smells like the frost is coming and we’re listening as we hear the darkness speak to us in its hushed cadences, as if it’s there and not there, all at the same time. Lead singer Kyle Wilson breaks the relative silence when he sings of the carnivores out there, making the rounds, just trying to feed their bellies, keep some meat on their little ones’ ribs. He cooks up these visuals of the slow movements of instincts and of the survival of the fittest, natural selection and all that. The movements of the music are our movements – the ones we keep to ourselves – but with this lovely outdoor arena, when we can be assured that no one but the moths and the predators are going to see us, we let them out. We express the things that we feel inside. Wilson sings, “Do you know what the darkness sang to me?/She said, ‘Son, you better get used to loving things that you can’t see,'” on the album’s title track and it’s an indication of what we’re going to be heading back to when this night’s spell has worn off. We’re free to hang around here as long as we’d like and to keep feeling this security, with Wilson also offering, “It’s like the wolf’s howl out of the wind/They know there’s nothing to kill.” It’s that comfortable night air and Milagres’ enchanted fling with us talking and howling and we find it all to be the work of the rustic and electric bogeymen.