Sunday, December 14, 2008

Human Bell: s/t

The self-titled debut from the collaboration between friends Nathan Bell (Lungfish) and Dave Heumann (Arbouretum), Human Bell is a play in restraint and exploration, the kind of patient, cyclic music of two friends on a back porch somewhere, friends who evidently share the same love of early U.S. folk and blues, friends who make music with clean electric guitars rooted in the unhurried simplicity of old Takoma records, songs that gain momentum but never really ignite. Which is fine. Heumann and Bell add the kind of intuitive detail to each other’s playing that makes the record’s seven longish tracks — all but two clock in at over five minutes — survive on their own terms, the songs all the stronger for not flying off into the endless soloing that made Arbouretum’s otherwise strong Rites of Uncovering such heavy going.  

Though backed on drums for half the tracks, the record is always Heumann and Bell, two friends circling each other at a measured pace, talking without raising their voices, their fluency so seamless as to make it impossible to know who’s playing what.
Working from such a simple palette, the two allow just enough outside flourishes to prevent the mesmerising from becoming the soporific, the swampy trumpets of ‘Ephaphatha (Be Opened)’ a kind of unhinged call to arms enveloping the guitars, the song’s forbidding murk a welcome respite from the record’s measured front half.

Things start getting noisier, looser as they go on—the record’s closer, ‘Singing Trees’, finds Heumann and Bell busting some cathartic stoner-rock, the two sounding like a reined-in Bardo Pond over a woolly drone before letting it all go to wash. But even as they start to kick it out a bit on tracks like ‘Hanging From the Rafters,’ an insistent 10-minute cycle of circular riffing and the record’s longest track, for all their notes, the songs themselves are still relatively minimalist in their intent, each piece trying to put flesh on the bones of just one or two ideas, confident enough in the rudiments themselves.  

Originally published here. 

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