Arbouretum, Rites of Uncovering

It’s funny, but while Arbouretum’s “Pale Rider Blues” swipes the title of a classic Eastwood flick, it sure as hell sounds like the band picked the wrong one to swipe from. This is far closer to High Plains Drifter, for my money. The bass plods along darkly, repeating the same two notes over and over again while the guitars wail forlornly above and frontman/songwriter Dave Heumann (who made his bones playing with Papa M., Bonnie Prince Billy, Anomoanon, and other folk) solemnly ponders deep, gloomy things. It’s windswept, haunting, and dusty, a song for a dead, moonlit desert night.

The “desert” feel holds throughout Rites of Uncovering — even brighter, prettier tracks like “Ghosts of Here and There” or the tribal-sounding “Two Moons” seep in like sand coming in through a hole in a tent. Heumann and company take hold of vintage California folk-rock a la Buffalo Springfield and force-feed it quaaludes ’til everything slows to an utterly deliberate pace, stark but with a hint of psychedelic strangeness peeking in around the corners. Simply put, Arbouretum could well be the genteel, thinking-man’s counterpart to Josh Homme’s whole blistered Death Valley rock scene.

At its sparsest, as on “Tonight’s A Jewel,” the band strolls along like a less-bitter Richard Thompson, but when they turn up the volume (a bit), they’re Neil Young & Crazy Horse slowed down two speeds. That ’60s vibe filters through from time to time (the murky storytelling of “Mohammed’s Hex and Bounty”), lending a gritty, earthy soul to the music and giving some substance to the darkly-imagined lyrics.

The guitars are thick and meaty at times, lanky and prog at others, and tempered with a thoroughly post-millennial sense of restraint and balance; it all meanders, but it’s not lost, just somehow searching. And with three languid tracks longer than 7:00 (closing field chant-cum-Are You Experienced? outtake “The Rise” is 11+ minutes long), these guys (Heumann, Walker David Teret, Corey Allender, and Daniel Franz) sound like they could draw out a jam for a couple of hazy, head-nodding days. Hell, if it’s all like this, I know I wouldn’t mind.