Abronia Premiere “Half Hail” Video from The Whole of Each Eye
Posted in Bootleg Theater on March 12th, 2020 by JJ Koczan
With their big drum and pedal steel guitar reverberating out over the ancient treetops of the Pacific Northwest, Portland’s Abronia released their second album, The Whole of Each Eye, last Fall through Cardinal Fuzz and Feeding Tube Records. As the follow-up to their 2017 debut, Obsidian Visions / Shadowed Lands (review here), the richly atmospheric and periodically sax’ed up six-song/35-minute long-player brims with a heavy Americana ambience, its percussive presence both simple — indeed, centered around beating a very large single drum — and intricate, with tabourine and shakers and cymbals and other beat-keeping whathaveyou.
A few years of lineup changes find half of the six-piece newly arrived, with Rick Pedrosa on pedal steel, Shaun Lyvers on bass and Paul Michael Schaefer on guitar joining original members Keelin Mayer (vocals and saxophone), Eric Crespo (guitar, backing vocals) and Shaver (percussion and melodica), but the songwriting is likewise coherent and avant garde, with Mayer out front in post-Grace Slick form on resonant early pieces like leadoff “Wound Site” and the subsequent “Rope of Fire,” on which her repetitions of “defender!” give way to a wash of pedal steel and melodica at the end, moving smoothly into the more straightforward guitar-led progression of “Cross the Hill,” like the opening credits of a Morricone score translated into a pop progression, something of a respite from the starker atmosphere of the first two cuts, but still definitely a ceremony.
Nalin Silva and Eric Crespo recorded analog at Type Foundry in Portland, while Billy Anderson mixed,
and neither would seem to have been a minor task — getting the material down or putting it in some semblance of order in a way that captures both the variety of arrangement elements in play at any given moment (usually, but not always) behind Mayer‘s strong voice and the sense of space essential to Abronia‘s atmospheric goals. The Whole of Each Eye succeeds in this, however, and whether it’s the sax freakout in the second half of side B’s “New Winds for the Warming Sands” mirroring the louder stretches of “Wound Site” or the album’s longest piece, “Half Hail,” which follows at 6:49, taking its time unfolding through shimmering guitar into a sense of forest ritualism and near-tribal urgency in a midsection drone/percussion solo built up Wovenhand-style as the song moves into its second half to a glorious instrumental return and shouting finish.
This leaves “Cauldron’s Gold,” which begins in more subdued fashion, to close out, which it does with a nod to folkish intent in Mayer‘s gentle delivery and the slow cymbal march taking place with the patient guitar. As the track moves into its second half, it finds more volume and tonal fullness, but cuts and recedes again before making its actual last push, hitting the record’s noisiest mark before cutting quickly to silence right about at the six-minute mark, seeming to leave the meditation almost in mid-mantra, instrumentally speaking, and no doubt purposefully. The diversity of Abronia‘s approach, even as relates to hearing The Whole of Each Eye in terms of the record they put out before it, speaks to the overarching creative depth and progressive intention, as well as to the clearheaded sense of who they are that underscores the gorgeous and sometimes threatening portrayal of nature in their material.
Drawing from as vast a landscape as they do, musically and in terms of the actual landscape(s) they’re evoking, Abronia‘s will to craft actual songs is all the more admirable. Even in their wildest stretches, they never seem entirely lost any more than they want to be in the ritualism they’ve casted, and at both their most minimal and lushest reaches, they safely guide their audience across the relatively brief but memorable journey that The Whole of Each Eye becomes.
It is my pleasure to host the premiere of the video for “Half Hail” — floating orb and all — which you can find below. Abronia currently have a European tour in the works that will culminate with an appearance at Yellowstock Festival XII in Belgium early in August. More on that to come.
Until then, please enjoy:
Abronia, “Half Hail” official video premiere
The follow up to their debut, The Whole of Each Eye sees Abronia cementing its very singular place in the canon of the broader psych rock universe. A six piece consisting of two guitars, electric bass, tenor saxophone, pedal steel, and one 32” inch bass drum (no drum set here), Abronia pulls from kraut rock, spaghetti Western soundtracks, doom, 60’s UK folk, spiritual jazz, ritualistic drone, and infuse it all with the arid haze of deserts near and far.
Video by Aubrey Nehring – https://aubreynehring.com
Abronia are:
Keelin Mayer – tenor saxophone and vocals
Rick Pedrosa – pedal steel
Eric Crespo – guitar and backing vocals
Paul Michael Schaefer – guitar
Shaun Lyvers – bass
Shaver – the big drum/percussion/melodica
Abronia, The Whole of Each Eye (2019)
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