Review & Full Album Premiere: Blue Heron, Ephemeral
[Click play above to stream Blue Heron’s Ephemeral in full. Album is out Friday on Kozmik Artifactz and Seeing Red Records.]
True, the blue heron is not a desert bird. They live in wetlands. One imagines that Albuquerque, New Mexico’s Blue Heron — who include the line, “without water we’ll drink the sand,” in the song “Futurola” which opens their debut album, Ephemeral — chose it because in some Native American traditions, to see a blue heron is a positive omen for a fishing trip, or a sign of growth and evolution more generally. One doubts the four-piece get much fishing done in Albuquerque, so perhaps it’s safe to assume their nod is to the latter.
Such would seem to be borne out across the 47 minutes and eight songs of Ephemeral, which sees issue through Seeing Red Records and Kozmik Artifactz and follows only a couple of compilation/tribute appearances and the band’s late-2021 two-songer Black Blood of the Earth / A Sunken Place (review here), the video that accompanied same accomplishing much in terms of establishing the band’s persona as they rocked a barroom venue with drummer Ricardo Sanchez turning in a full-body performance behind the kit. One very much gets the sense that he’s doing the same on the rest of the tracks here, and whether it’s the heavy-but-laid-back classic desert rock unfurling of “Futurola,” the lumbering-into-freakout-into-space-out-jam in the midsection of the subsequent 13-minute viber “Sayonara” or the later march of “The Buck” that sets out into the sandy wastes with a backpack made of highlight fuzz, rhythm is very much at the heart of Ephemeral.
Can’t groove without it, and it’s the groove that ties the scream-sludgy payoff of “Push the Sky” to the angular turns prior, the crunching, gruff rush early in “Black Blood of the Earth” to its willfully meandering, spoken-word-topped second half, like a post-grunge noise solution to the problem of ‘how do we get lost on purpose.’ That’s not to minimize the contributions of bassist Steve Schmidlapp, or guitarist Mike Chavez and vocalist Jadd Shickler, the latter two of whom also played together in Spiritu, whose self-titled debut was issued in 2002 and of whom Blue Heron might be considered a spiritual successor in terms of their general approach.
Shickler — who’s invariably more known for having also co-founded MeteorCity, today runs Blues Funeral Recordings and contributes to Ripple Music, Magnetic Eye Records, the PostWax vinyl subscription service (for which I do liner notes; full disclosure), and so on — and Chavez dig into older-school heavy/desert vibes throughout, and the ability and readiness to break out a more aggressive stance across Ephemeral is part of that, though at the same time, they offer the Chavez-solo drifting interlude “Infiniton Field” and the acoustic/pedal steel-laced Americana expanse of the penultimate two-minute instrumental “Where One Went Together,” and those are decidedly drawn from newer influences; a bit of Lord Buffalo to go with the underlying Dozer, at least in the case of “Where One Went Together.” It’s only fair to read this as Blue Heron‘s omen of evolving coming to fruition in the songs themselves, which is arguably the ideal for the band, particularly on their first full-length.
The broad scope they set is likewise realized among the shifts in tonality and meter, though certainly the heart of Ephemeral is in the fuzz of Chavez‘s guitar, which shoves the listener into the first verse of “Futurola” like Kyuss pushing over “Gardenia.” Pairing that song and the more purposefully vast “Sayonara” — which opens like “War Pigs” at the wrong (right) speed — as the record’s initial salvo has a lasting effect on the atmosphere of what follows, and even when “The Buck” leads into “Black Blood of the Earth,” which is the pairing of two tracks that are the most similar in their intention throughout, those two songs have distinctive resonances. Elsewhere, the shout-topped payoff of “Sayonara” gives way to the comparatively stripped down, backing vocal-inclusive melodic highlight “Push the Sky,” from which they set off into the “Infiniton Field” before the steady, righteously-stoner-rock drawn-out intro of “The Buck” establishes the beginning of a subtle and effective linear build unto its final rumble.
That’s one from which the tense noise at the outset of “Black Blood of the Earth” looses its initial tom-fueled intensity, which seems to be maintained even through the more open-sounding midsection until at last the song lets go of your lungs and turns at about five minutes in to its heavy psych-style exploration, which caps with fingers sliding on strings as one imagines pedals are clicked off and gives over to the acoustic strums of “Where One Went Together” and, ultimately, to the finale “Salvage,” which answers the layering of “Push the Sky,” the head-down force of “Black Blood of the Earth” and reaffirms the threat that at any point Blue Heron can and just might bring forward their sludgier impulses, which they do as the track’s seems to break apart at the conclusion of the album before it turns around for one final clearheaded chorus.
This movement of one into the next into the next is more than about run-on sentences. It’s the flow of Ephemeral as an entirety, and though as a 47-minute LP it’s pushing the limits of that format in terms of runtime, there is not a song in which the overarching fluidity of the whole work is sacrificed.
I am not impartial here, on multiple fronts. First, no one’s ever truly impartial about anything. Ever. Second, and in the interest of further full-disclosure, I’ve known Shickler for about 20 years now since his MeteorCity days, and we communicate on the regular for PostWax, other bands, and more besides. I consider him a friend and often a monumental pain in the ass (which is how you know I really mean that “friend” part). Accordingly, even if I didn’t dig Ephemeral, I probably wouldn’t say so. However, if I didn’t dig Ephemeral, I also wouldn’t be streaming it or reviewing it in this manner, or even telling you this. One way or the other, Ephemeral sets its goals clearly in its songs and meets them front to back.
In terms of my actual listening experience, there are parts where I can pick out nuances from acts Shickler has long associated with, be it the aforementioned Dozer, or Lowrider, or Unida, but even for a listener not coming into Blue Heron‘s debut with my personal context, its melding together of cross-generational sounds is not to be overlooked. The songs are considered and developed, but full of life, and they offer forward glimpses as well as potent nostalgia. As a record, Ephemeral is folkloric in that way, even if the title imagines things coming and going in the passage of time.
Blue Heron, “Black Blood of the Earth” official video
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Tags: Albuquerque, Blue Heron, Blue Heron Ephemeral, Ephemeral, Kozmik Artifactz, New Mexico, Seeing Red Records
Great review, I truly dig this album, listening to it about twice a day, since last Friday; one of the best so far in 2022 and most likely to end up in my top 10