I don’t even know how much oh-my-stars-style hyperbole has been foisted upon San Diego’s Birth for their debut album, Born (review here), which was released last month, but I’m fairly sure the point has gotten across. Melodies and mellotrons, mellow vibes and melancholia, the four-piece of vocalist/keyboardist Conor Riley, guitarist/keyboardist Brian Ellis, bassist Trevor Mast and drummer Paul Marrone — since replaced by Thomas Dibenedetto — make a home for themselves on the dusty fairgrounds of classic progadelia, too thoughtful to be lost in the cosmos but far too ready to fly to be held to ground.
So be it. A first album is always a convenient starting point, unless it sucks — not applicable here — but the context behind Born goes well beyond a nine-month gestation. Riley and Ellis previously worked together in Astra, whose two albums pioneered a lush progressive style that would inform what the San Diego heavy underground became in its well-populated 2010s boom, and Mast and Marrone are a dream team of rhythmic fluidity — the same could be said with Dibenedetto‘s name switched in; his work in Sacri Monti, Joy, Ellis/Munk Ensemble, etc. has never had any trouble keeping up with even the most winding of motions — and whether or not it becomes such, Birth‘s first full-length feels like the beginning of a longer collaboration between these players. Maybe that’s “me want more”-style wishful thinking, but listening to “For Yesterday” right now as I write this sentence and knowing from talking to Riley that it was the last song put together for the album makes me remarkably excited both for what this band is doing and what they might continue to do, probably in a few years, on their next offering.
My schedule is a mess these days, so before you jump into the video, please understand that this wasn’t necessarily easy to make happen, but I very much appreciate Riley‘s patience in coordinating with my pain in the ass self and my odd hours, especially as he’s on the West Coast and I very much am not. If you haven’t heard the record yet, it’s streaming in full below the interview, and yes, by all means, dig in and muck around in the world they create for a while. I sincerely doubt you’ll regret doing so.
Please enjoy:
Birth, Video Interview with Conor Riley
Birth’s Born is out now on Bad Omen Records. More info and updates at the links below.
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.
Posted in Whathaveyou on May 31st, 2022 by JJ Koczan
It’s a very specific and kind of confusing brand of fun to trace the full lineage of Birth and who’s played in what with whom, whether it’s Conor Riley and Brian Ellis jamming together in the Ellis/Munk Ensemble or the still-missed Astra, Thomas DiBenedetto drumming for Sacri Monti or Monarch, Trevor Mast having been in Psicomagia with Paul Marrone, also of Radio Moscow, and so on. Certainly anything Ellis and Riley do together at this point is going to immediately and rightfully catch some ears, and from the time when Birth‘s “Descending Us” (posted here) showed up in 2017 to last year when the band signed to Bad Omen and streamed their three-song self-titled demo (review here), the murmuring anticipation for this record has been set. Of course they called it Born.
July 15 is the release date, and I’m somewhat curious as to the situation, since the press release below confirms that Bad Omen will be handling it while at the same time having come down the PR wire via Metal Blade Records. Does that mean that Bad Omen is now a Metal Blade imprint? Or that Metal Blade will handle the US release and Bad Omen the UK? I have no idea, but it’s something to be curious about while I listen to “For Yesterday,” the first streaming track from the record, which you’ll find at the bottom of this post.
Enjoy:
Progressive-Psych outfit Birth to Release Debut LP, ‘Born’, July 15
San Diego Stunners Set Summer Date for Stargazing Full-length Album; Hear Celestial New Track “For Yesterday”
Southern California psychedelic/progressive rock unit, Birth, will release its full-length debut LP, ‘Born’, on July 15 via UK rock label Bad Omen Records (Wytch Hazel, Spell, Satan’s Satyrs). Featuring members of San Diego’s revered retro rockers Astra, along with current or former members of Joy, Radio Moscow, and Sacri Monti, Birth owns a cavernous cache of credibility rarely found in developing musical groups. Described as “a magic-eye journey into kaleidoscopic sound”, and “a dystopian take on the here and now”, ‘Born’ is available for pre-order purchase at: birthprog.bandcamp.com
A first listen to what Birth’s ‘Born’ holds in store can be experienced now as the band is streaming its new song “For Yesterday”. Hear it now at: birthprog.bandcamp.com
Featuring guitarist/keyboardist/vocalist Conor Riley and lead guitarist Brian Ellis, musicians who burst onto the prog-psych scene in the late aughts with Astra, a formidable, foundational group who would shape the sound of things to come alongside co-conspirators such as Earthless, Diagonal and Dungen, and whose albums ‘The Weirding’ (2009) and ‘The Black Chord’ (2012) stand proud as two of the greatest progressive achievements of this century thus far, there is a palatable excitement surrounding Birth and the group has been pegged as one to watch in underground circles, an excitement which kicked into a new gear once a now-deleted demo ep was unleashed, on a pay-what-you-will basis, on the Bandcamp platform in 2021, which marked the spark of creation for the Birth universe and delivered a blast of vibrant progressive rock rich in cinematic scope and psychedelic intensity and laid the groundwork for what was to come.
“Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world” . So wrote Mary Shelley in Frankenstein, arguably the first science fiction tale. A full 204 years later, the quest remains – how best to elucidate our daily lives with some form of inspiration that moves the spirit beyond its earthly shackles?
On ‘Born’, Birth musically and creatively constructs a science-fiction-inspired sound-world in which bleak tumult and skybound rapture co-exist. The result is an intoxicating album haunted by earthly concerns while its sonics aim simultaneously for the stars. “I’m a scientist by trade and I read a lot of dystopian sci-fi, which I believe is relevant to many of the events that have been occurring lately,” notes Riley. “These views feed a dark, spiritual and mystical relationship that I have with scientific thought”.
Track listing: 01. Born 02. Descending Us 03. For Yesterday 04. Cosmic Tears 05. Another Time 06. Long Way Down
Birth features Conor Riley (vocals, keyboards, acoustic guitar), Brian Ellis (lead guitar, keyboards), Trevor Mast (bass), and Thomas DiBenedetto (drums). Drums on ‘Born’ performed by Paul Marrone.
