The Friday Find: Byrne - Slowly and Gloriously

Byrne - Slowly and Gloriously [Rocket Girl, 2002]

[click to download]
5/5

Byrne's Slowly and Gloriously has been one of my most listened to albums (well, its an EP if you want to get technical--only 6 tracks) since the day I bought it on a whim from a Newbury Comics used bin for 50 cents. I was drawn to the eerie cover art, the fact that their band name caused mild confusion with David Byrne, song titles like "Waiting for Winter" or "Drink All Day."

This is certainly not a pop-accessible album (with the exception of "Tidal Wave," their "single"), full of melancholic piano, humble vocals, low tempos, and sparse (if not absent) drumming. Many songs tend to chug along on one-chord for their entirety. While this may sound boring, it is anything but. The atmosphere created by the music is beautiful and haunting, hopeful and devastating, other cliché paired antonyms. Fueled by the "byrnetempi," or singer/writer Patrick Byrne's self-modified electric keyboard, the album has such a unique sound it is quite difficult to really compare it to any other artist.

Opening with "Waiting for Winter," Byrne dive right into the kind of song you'd expect to hear based on the cover. Light piano, ghostly "oohs," echoes of harmonica, and eventually a simple electronic beat back Byrne singing about waiting for the winter while standing in the sun, or, looking for the bad times while still in something good--a sort of nervous apprehension that tends to reverberate through the rest of the album.

From there, the plodding "Sleeping Giant" comes in, hammering away on one chord for nearly 6 minutes, but still managing to take the music somewhere and build intensity with swirling organ, guitars, and bass (which really provides the variation from the single chord). This is my track pick for the album, by far. Byrne's vocals strike hard on the oft-repeated chorus, "if it's everything you wanted baby, you're never gonna get it all," building to a swirl of chromatic guitar that pushes the song to its climactic end, then gradually strips apart into the next track. "Greener" and "Tidal Wave" bring the focus back to acoustic guitar, and pull off lines like "the grass is always greener when it rains" or "everybody knows that when you're up, I'm down" without seeming over-the-top emotional, just brutally honest.

My other favorite track off the album, "Embers" is built on melodica and trumpet counter-melodies, while the lyrics evoke a scene in a smoke-hazed bar and the mystifying allure of a blues singer. The track builds to epic bombast, and then slowly deconstructs itself into a lone descending piano line. This paves the way to the album closer "Drink All Day," a song that features Byrne's vocals almost naked, with a barely-there electric guitar providing a base for his toast to lonely times. [A short two-minute instrumental hidden track follows later, a duet of bass clarinet and piano called "Ballad for the Wet Dog."]

The sad story behind Byrne is that in 2004, they posted a new, incredible demo on their website, promising new material to come soon, but then their domain expired sometime in '05 or '06 and there has been no official news of whatever happened to the band since (they were rather obscure to begin with, anyway).

Sometimes I feel like Slowly and Gloriously just completely synced with the person I was back when I bought it, and so it has a sense of nostalgia to me, but upon many many many repeated listens, each of these 6 amazing tracks still seem like something special to me, years later. Unless they lose their luster (something I don't anticipate happening), this album will always be perfect, to me. Give a listen and see if you agree.