Album Review: Birth, Born
Whoever sent the text, or — if they were feeling old-fashioned as they might’ve been in the spirit of the classic prog sought in the music, placed the land-line call from a bright orange rotary phone made of BPA-loaded plastic — to actually start the band, the members of Birth are not strangers to each other. The San Diego four-piece’s debut album, Born, follows after a well-received 2017 three-songer picked up for issue through Bad Omen Records in 2021 titled simply, Demo (review here) — should be noted that it sounded better than many acts’ albums — and the connections between the players involved go back more than a decade to the evolution of Astra from keyboardist/vocalist Conor Riley‘s Silver Sunshine, as he and Brian Ellis (also of Brian Ellis Group, Ellis/Munk Ensemble, Psicomagia and any number of other jazz-informed fusioneers), renew a collaboration put to rest in 2013/2014 following two albums, 2009’s The Weirding (review here; discussed here) and 2012’s The Black Chord (review here), both of which are landmarks for San Diego’s particular vision of prog rock as informed by heavy psychedelia.
Riley (who also contributes acoustic guitar to Birth) and Ellis (guitar, percussion, more keys) are joined on Born by bassist Trevor Mast, who featured on Joy‘s first LP and was in Psicomagia with Ellis, and drummer Paul Marrone, who also played in Psicomagia and has a pedigree that includes Radio Moscow, Joy (second album), Brian Ellis Group, Cosmic Wheels, and so on. Marrone has left the band since Born was recorded, replaced by Thomas Dibenedetto, also of Ellis/Munk Ensemble, Joy (third album), Sacri Monti, Monarch, and so on — one does not worry about their being left in capable hands — deepening the connections even further on the extended family tree that is the deeply creative San Diego scene, mature now compared to a decade ago and a constantly changing sphere of bands, different players collaborating, solo-projects, etc. If Birth was born, the place where it happened is likewise relevant to the output on the album itself as the players’ familiarity with each other is to the music.
Even putting aside Birth‘s aesthetic, which finds them jamming through the instrumental, titular opener “Born,” offering headphone-ready depth of sound en route to direct-feeling references for Deep Purple‘s “Child in Time” in “Descending Us” and King Crimson‘s “Epitaph” in the subsequent “For Yesterday,” they in no way sound like a new band. They didn’t on the demo either, where “Descending Us” also appeared, and the chemistry throughout Born benefits from the obvious familiarity of the players with each other — something that one would expect to continue as Dibenedetto takes the reins on drums from Marrone, who of course shines here despite not being in the band anymore — and in that way it’s almost unfair to think of Born as a debut.
This is a new project, sure, but drawing on a backlog of experience such that, as side A pushes toward the standout hook spread across the nine minutes of “For Yesterday,” careening, twisting, masterful, but with just a bit of harder edge in “Born” and “Descending Us” to coincide with all that melodic wash from the keys, guitar and vocals, the solo-laced grandeur of the latter particularly sets up the dramatic feel of “For Yesterday.” Getting there is no less important than being there, but “For Yesterday” feels very much like a landing point for the first three songs and the album as a whole, conjuring an atmosphere of quiet contemplation despite not coming close to being minimalist with organ and various other vintage-sounding keyboards — maybe some Mellotron sounds; there certainly seems to be some of that going on in the title-track, though you’ll pardon my limited background in analog synth instrumentation — coinciding with the guitar, bass, drums, languid pace and fluid ending via one last chorus, letting side B pick up essentially by starting all over again.
It does, but Birth aren’t the kind of outfit to repeat themselves however much they might develop and explore themes in their work. The structure of side B’s three songs in some ways mirrors side A. The opener, “Cosmic Tears,” is instrumental, as was “Born,” but it’s longer, funkier in the bassline from Mast, and works into some deceptively complex chugging in its midsection that unfolds like jazz improv and may or may not be precisely that before turning quiet again, going to ground before its final, surge and eventual organ-and-drum bounce into a stretch of silence before “Another Time” takes hold as the shortest vocalized inclusion, still finding plenty of room in its five and a half minutes for melo-prog splendour, an especially dreamy break seeming to follow a similar pattern as “Cosmic Tears” but capping with its crescendo rather than allowing the full comedown.
That difference allows the energy as well as the trance to hold over into album-closer “Long Way Down,” with its ride-cymbal-and-noodling verse and chorus swells, a shove that again feels parented by the earliest days of King Crimson et al, and a shift into thrilling lead work from various keys and Ellis‘ gonna-just-hang-here-and-shred-for-a-bit-like-it’s-no-big-deal guitar, the 4:17 mark finding vocals and that guitar coming together as a point of apex leading into a brief instrumental chase in what sounds like multiple dimensions before a last linear verse and guitar solo cap, not quite unceremoniously but well aware that the point has already been made and too classy to want to blow it out as an overstatement.
Perhaps the highest compliment one might pay Birth‘s Born is that it adds to the respective legacies of the players involved — Riley, Ellis, Mast, Marrone — but it also begins to stake out a new path of exploration for them together (Marrone aside) and an avenue through which they already are and can continue to develop their songwriting as a unit and bask in the multi-tiered dynamic of their material, which only seems to have more room for whatever they want to put to it. Born sounds recent but has an older soul, and like any new arrival leads one to wonder what future explorations might produce, but in an unpredictable future and concerning a band whose members have no shortage of other projects going, it might be best to appreciate the work they’re doing here rather than lose oneself to daydreams of glories to come. There’s plenty of fodder for that, sure, but to engage Birth on a conscious level is to understand that much more the artistry, skill and scope of its songs.
