Feathers' music is not so much songs as gentle, enveloping clouds,
jangling with strummed string instruments and punctuated by bongo slaps,
sung in many different voices and following a wandering, flower-strewn path
through rural utopias. This eight-person collective hails from Western
Massachusetts and Southern Vermont, perhaps the last place on earth that looks like the pastoral landscapes dreamed by Tyrannosaurus Rex and Vashti
Bunyan. This is a place where the grass turns green in a single week late
in April, followed by the eruption of thousands of dandelions, an event
that is as simultaneously ordinary and transcendent as Feathers' breathy melodies. So it is perhaps fitting that the first whistling,
jigging, Eastern-droning tune on the self-titled album is called "Old Black
Hat With a Dandelion Flower," its serpentine harmonies and tangled rhythms
celebrating the spiritual resonance of everyday objects.
You can't really talk about Feathers without evoking the hippie
ideal. Live, they take the stage like some strange tribe, elfish women in
loose skirts, long-haired men, and instruments — dulcimers, a bright-green
mandolin, sitars, various percussion and guitars — scattered across the
floor. The sense of sharing, the lack of hierarchy, come through at
every song change, as players move from front to back, from guitar to
drums, from xylophone to toy piano. Every song brings a new configuration,
a new singer, a new sound. It might be Kurt breathing impossibly high
melodies, then Meara caressing wordless "aahs" with infinite gentleness,
Kyle warbling Ed Askew-like, or Ruth high and pure and soft. On the
self-titled record, these differences merge into a cohesive, breeze-light
sound, as gently beautiful and dreamy as anything you'll hear.
The reference points are obvious — early Tyrannosaurus Rex, Incredible
String Band, Donovan, Vashti, and more contemporary friends and patrons
Devendra Banhart and Andy Cabic of Vetiver. Like all these bands, Feathers
take traditional folk forms and extend them into Eastern drones,
Latin lilts and free-improv dissonances. And as with these bands, the result
feels as unconstrained as breathing. There's an indefinable freshness and
purity here, both in the minimal musings of "Past the Moon" and the denser,
jazz-infused mystery of "Van Rat." "Ulna," with its narcotic blend of
wordless sighs and slow waltz-time strums, is petal-soft and lovely,
feeling more like a natural occurrence than a song that people wrote and
practiced.
The disc closes with "Come Around," a wonderful, folk-centered song that is
more structured and less atmospheric than earlier cuts. Its invites us all
to "come around, come around, come around," to join a mythical tribe and
partake in a circle of warmth and natural collaboration. It's a beautiful
illusion, fragile and delicate and otherworldly, as real to Feathers as it
is imaginary to most of us — and that's perhaps why this debut album is
so
intoxicating.
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