Arbouretum, Song of the Pearl

I can’t entirely put my finger on why, but it always seems to take me quite a while to fully wrap my head around an Arbouretum album. With 2007’s Rites of Uncovering, I found myself compelled to listen and re-listen and re-listen to the disc before I felt like I could even talk about it, and it’s turning out to be somewhat the same deal with this year’s followup, Song of the Pearl.

In a way, I guess it makes sense, as the two albums run parallel in a lot of ways — at its core, each is really about a journey, about traveling and the discovery that occurs in that process. The principal difference here is that while Rites of Uncovering came off as an out-of-time, backwards-looking tale of a lonesome, forlorn rider across the dunes and steppes of some distant (in space and time, maybe) landscape, Song of the Pearl feels more modern, more contemporary, a humming, non-stop cruise down some desolate highway through nowhere.

The music fits the mood admirably, as well. The album starts off with “False Spring,” a hypnotic, circular-sounding track that rolls onward at a steady, methodical pace, all sun-baked and dusty and road-worn, setting the tone for the rest of the songs, while dark, introspective “Another Hiding Place” sounds like it could’ve fallen straight off ’70s AOR radio, with guitars that remind me of Neil Young (or Young-follower Joel R. Phelps) in that they meander across the terrain of the song, never really repeating but instead continually evolving and shifting subtly.

Things take a noisier turn further on, with raw, rocking “Thin Dominion,” which retains that slow deliberateness even as it cranks up the volume, and the jaw-dropping grandeur of “The Midnight Cry,” which sounds to me like one hell of a Parts & Labor outtake, with roaring guitars that step in and out of the song like shifting walls of melodic noise. It melds the forward-looking, thundering spacerock sound with Heumann’s understated, slightly country-tinged vocals, and holy shit does it work beautifully.

“Down by the Fall Line” is softer and less fuzzy-sounding, just shuffling along gently and quietly unfolding like a flower opening to light; the title track is similarly low-key, spiraling out a convoluted, half-seen story about “the Brown Times,” whatever the hell those may be. I love Heumann’s songwriting, by the way, partly because he possesses a writer’s sense of tension and restraint, knowing that hinting at something and not spelling it out can suck the listener/reader in more than flat-out telling them what you’re talking about. I’ve got no idea what “Down by the Fall Line” is about, but it’s mesmerizing nonetheless.

In fact, the only truly “obvious” track on here is closer “Tomorrow is a Long Time,” which is a broken-hearted, melancholy folk song draped with distorted chords and stoner-rock ambience — strip away all that, and what you’re left with is remarkably similar to “The Wind That Shakes the Barley,” all raw emotion and sadness and solitude. This time the sun may not beat down as hard, but the loneliness of The Road is still there, in full effect.

Or is it? Upon closer listening, Pearl sounds almost like Arbouretum mastermind Dave Heumann has, well, finally found somebody to make his journey with. Rites was unrelentingly bleak and mysterious, without much of a gleam of hope over the horizon, but while Heumann is, for all intents and purposes, the core of the band, Pearl is more like a tour diary, notes from travels with a handful of unwashed, laconic, similarly-obsessed friends/acquaintances through that same blasted landscape. On “The Midnight Cry,” in particular, Heumann seems to be referring to multiple people traveling along together, even if he never lets you look at their faces directly.

With Rites, Heumann was lost and utterly, totally alone, a solitary wanderer in search of…something. With Song of the Pearl, it sounds like maybe he’s finally found it — or at least, he’s learned that the seeking can be an end in and of itself, and this time he’s bringing fellow wanderers along for the ride.