(2021) Valley Maker - When the Day Leaves



Review:
Trained as a Human Geographer, which essentially entails understanding how people and places interconnect politically, economically and socially and the inequalities power relations produce, this is the fourth album by Austin Crane, his first since returning home to South Carolina after several years in Seattle. He describes it as a way to make sense of what it means to be human, connect, embrace change, and face another day, especially the current socio-political turmoil of America, beleaguered by racial injustice, and, although written before the pandemic, a world beset by change and uncertainty. “Love is a home that I build and I break/All in a day’s work” he sings on the opening ‘Branch I Bend’, a puttering drum beat and meandering guitar lines anchoring a number contemplating relationships and having “A little less certainty these days”. Vocally, there’s something compelling about how he wraps it around the material, next up being the horns-shaded No One Is Missing, a song about trying to fathom how to connect with each other on both a societal and personal level, about being “Human in a crowded room”, linked to how life as a travelling musician will always time slipping way in relation to those from whom you are apart. A similar notion informs Pine Trees with its scuffed and brushed drums, woodwinds and the words tumbling out as he sings of both how “I could find my place/In any town” yet also of trying to return to some organic sense of being rooted, while on Instrument, another number related to life on the road (“I called you from Berlin/Hanging on your life”), he’s “just a drop in a cloud”, not a person but “the sound of the future”. The lyrics are generally abstract and impressionistic rather than unfolding a clear narrative, evoking rather than directing feelings and they work best when you just let them flow into you. However, having said that, the six-minute Mockingbird clearly relates to a need to belong and be at rest rather than in constant motion and “Go and plant my favorite tree/Sit for a while and watch it grow” while also touching on how there “Ain’t no love in the land we break/Ain’t no love on this interstate”. The album continues in a similar musically and lyrically reflective and ruminative mood through the likes of Aberration (“Lost where I’m going/Forgot where I’ve been”) and Voice Inside The Well with its “58 dead in Las Vegas” headline and its quest to find meaning within the chaos and for ugliness to take a day off, and to be aware of the voice inside. Images of dogs, rain, the night, trees, distance, the need of awakening all recur throughout the album, themes of missing things left behind, of attempting to connect or reconnect, through the phone, through music, of a freedom, a peace, the cusp of a revelation just out of reach but the belief that, as he sings in On A Relevation, though darkness is on display “goodness is abundant”. Following a hint of Dylan on the circling fingerpicked pattern of Freedom, it ends with the steady loping march beat of Line Erasing evocative of early Neil Young in a song the constraints of borderlines (“Borderline names me/Awake into the madness/Borderland blood keeps/Filling up the canyons/Borderlines greet me/At the edge of the palace”). Finally, it plays out with the simply strummed campfire and a cabin sing and sway of the title track that links together the present and the generations that have gone before and the legacy handed down, awakening to see the beauty of nature in everything that has a “strength in her life that defeats all their bullshit… the border checkpoints, the rifles, the politician jackals”. “Part of life is an accident.. part of life remains absurd”, he sings, but while the day may grow dim and leave, we sit and watch as it starts again. This album reminds us that the night is not endless.



Tracklist:
01 - Branch I Bend
02 - No One Is Missing
03 - Pine Trees
04 - Instrument
05 - Mockingbird
06 - Aberration
07 - Voice Inside the Well
08 - On a Revelation
09 - Freedom
10 - Line Erasing
11 - When the Day Leaves


Media Report:
Genre: indie-folk
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits