Full Album Premiere & Review: Brant Bjork, Bougainvillea Suite
Posted in audiObelisk, Reviews on October 26th, 2022 by JJ Koczan
[Click play above to stream Brant Bjork’s Bougainvillea Suite in its entirety. Album is out Friday through Heavy Psych Sounds.]
Cheers to whatever circumstances in the universe resulted in the usually-on-drums Ryan Güt getting an organ. Bougainvillea Suite is by somebody’s count the 14th studio album by Brant Bjork, and perhaps more crucially, it is the first since May 2020’s Brant Bjork (review here), an interim in which the multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, songwriter and desert rock figurehead has released two long-players as guitarist/vocalist as part of the trio Stöner with fellow Kyuss alum Nick Oliveri (also Mondo Generator, Dwarves, etc.) and the aforementioned Ryan Güt (on drums) in 2021’s Stoners Rule (review here) and 2022’s Totally… (review here). Because Stöner have been touring since about three months before it was actually safe for things to open up, Bougainvillea Suite — the thorny bougainvillea vines depicted on its cover art by Bjork and Mario Lalli (Yawning Man, Fatso Jetson, lately of Mario Lalli and the Rubber Snakecharmers, which is basically Stöner plus himself and vocalist/performance artist Sean Wheeler) — arrives as something of a surprise.
Led off by the cool start-stop bounce of “Trip on the Wine,” finished by the jamming Bo Diddley cover “Who Do You Love” (Quicksilver Messenger Service also did a version and George Thorogood made it a radio hit), with no shortage of hooks and Bjork‘s charismatic cool laced into the masterfully fuzzed “Good Bones,” the later “Ya Dig,” and so on, Bougainvillea Suite runs eight tracks in a relatively unassuming 41 minutes, and is fairly Stöner-adjacent in terms of sound and style. Güt may be on organ and percussion instead of drumming — Bjork handles vocals, guitar, bass, drums, and other percussion; co-produced with Yosef Sanborn at The Rad Cabin in Joshua Tree — and Oliveri may be relegated to an appearance on guitar and backing vocals on the song-for-our-times, finally-someone-saying-screw-it-let’s-get-high-in-a-way-that-isn’t-somehow-fascist “Bread for Butter,” but “Good Bones” and the subsequent “So They Say” have the laid back swing and swagger that are hallmarks of Bjork‘s work over the last 20-plus years of his solo career, and are composed in such a style that it feels like they could easily have been brought to a Stöner jam and turned into that band’s songs. Ditto “Ya Dig,” which actually it wouldn’t surprise in the slightest if it turned up on a third Stöner album, even more than “Bread for Butter,” which, again, has Oliveri singing on it.
This, however, is nothing to complain about, and while I’ll recognize that ‘Hey, Brant Bjork is writing songs that sound like Brant Bjork‘ isn’t exactly universe-defining insight, there’s no question he’s got a sound. For the last two years, that’s been channeled into getting Stöner going, and Bougainvillea Suite steps aside from that, but it’s largely inarguable, and with Güt on keys, these songs make a distinct impression whether it’s in comparison to the band in which Güt and Bjork also play or Bjork‘s solo catalog as a whole (did I mention 14 albums?). The organ is right there after the first drum fill in “Trip on the Wine,” and it runs a thread through the jabby-snare verses of “Good Bones” and fills out beneath the clever lyrics and telltale wah of “So They Say” before adding to the easy-motion twist of “Broke That Spell,” no less crucial an element than the guitar itself as it plays off the central riff and, especially in the latter, takes its own casual saunter of a progression as a preface for “Who Do You Love” still to come.
Like much of what persists throughout Bougainvillea Suite, that extended closing jam isn’t necessarily new ground for Bjork in terms of aesthetic or methodology, but in context it emphasizes the masterful hand with which he is able to guide the listener through the span of a classically constructed full-length; casual, funky and cool as ever, but not at all unconsidered. Side B, accordingly, is an expansion on the moves and tones established on side A, with “Bread for Butter” both the closest Bjork comes to Stöner and the most outward in terms of social commentary, though the comment is less political — Bjork has never shied away from speaking as a person of color through his music; see 2014’s Black Power Flower (review here), among myriad other examples; there is no sense of whitewash here either — than personal, an almost aspirational reminder to keep one’s head amid the onset of the various apocalypses of the last few years.
Sound advice, and if perhaps that same impulse is behind the willful mellowness that’s happening across Bougainvillea Suite, it would make sense, but Bjork has said that much of the ‘bittersweet’ spirit in these songs comes from his own ups and downs, and that after a stretch that might legitimately be defined as an era of his output, he’ll no longer be making records at the same studio in Joshua Tree. If “Bread for Butter” is trying to take that in stride too, well, it would be in character as well as on theme, and it works in the context of the album itself as well, since Bjork‘s laying out of options, “The Beatles or the Stones,” prefaces the bit of devil-sympathy that shows itself in the acoustic strum and hand percussion of “Let’s Forget,” a sweet and familiar refrain about the “beauty of now” with the title-line nestled into, “please let’s forget about yesterday.”
In terms of execution, the closing duo of “Let’s Forget” and “Who Do You Love” are clearly shooting for different vibes, the former wistful, the latter a blues jam built on top of cyclical tom runs, but they both bring into emphasis how much Güt is contributing here. “Let’s Forget” is peppered with melodic notes of what might be a Rhodes or at least Rhodes-ish sounds — if you told me it was guitar I’d just throw up my hands and say whatever; there are plenty of other examples to cite throughout the record in making the same point — and while it seems to be obscured before the song is really allowed to come apart following its here’s-another-channel-of-guitar solo (no complaints), the organ in “Who Do You Love” is as essential to defining the personality there as it is to “Trip on the Wine” or “Good Bones” back at the rockers-up-front outset. He’s the secret weapon in Stöner too. Should be used to it by now. While we’re talking about it, I’ll also note that few and far between are the artists who would allow someone else to have such an impact on a ‘solo’ record, and that is something to appreciate.
There’s some amount of reassurance to Bougainvillea Suite in that it reaffirms Bjork‘s commitment to the work he does under his own name even as Stöner continues to tour and will presumably have another LP coming barring disaster — the two so far and subsequent tours seem to have been well received — and its somewhat melancholy spirit speaks both to the times and the personal landmark that it is for Bjork as an artist. In a career more than 30 years deep that has likely seen peaks and valleys enough to make the Rockies blush, the greater comfort one derives from Bougainvillea Suite is knowing that whatever comes, Bjork will figure it out, keep making music, keep going. Longevity, creativity, his own style of craft and performance have made him desert rock’s most formidable ambassador. All of these elements, and more, are present here in ready supply.
