Album Review: Abronia, The High Desert Sessions
Posted in Reviews on July 10th, 2023 by JJ Koczan
A new Abronia album barely over a year since they put out their triumphant third record, Map of Dawn (review here)? Sort of. The Portland, Oregon, heavy psych/dark Americana crew offered that under-heralded LP — and it was plenty heralded, just not as much as it deserved — through Cardinal Fuzz and Feeding Tube Records, and The High Desert Sessions isn’t quite a proper follow-up. The clue is in ‘Sessions,’ in the title. Delivered through the same labels as its predecessor — it came out last Friday and I already missed getting one of the edition-of-80 CDRs; tape is still available as I write this — and what it hints toward is a familiar escapist narrative of a band absconding from real life and its sundry woes, secluding themselves in some remote location, a cabin in the woods or some such, and focusing on nothing but creating music for some given time.
It is an experiment many have undertaken, and Abronia — vocalist/tenor saxophonist Keelin Mayer, guitarists Paul Michael Schaefer and Eric Crespo (the latter also sometimes vocals), bassist Shaun Lyvers, Shaver on the big drum, and Rick Pedrosa on pedal steel — use the opportunity to conjure 12 tracks across a sometimes challenging but still manageable 37-minute LP that, really, you don’t have to worry that it sold out in like a day, because the music itself demands more to be made, let alone the buying public.
Headphones are just about mandatory for what might be Abronia‘s Walden, regardless of the volume or concentration one might otherwise give it. The material is too nuanced, too much going on in the percussion jam of “No Time for a Fire” with the repetitive curls of sax worked into the rhythm, and much of the atmospheric vocal work will simply fade into the background of the varied pieces in which it appears. And it doesn’t always. Most of The High Desert Sessions is instrumental. The album is deeply flowing through many shifts in arrangement, as though each of the 12 inclusions is a snippet of a longer improvisation or exploration, and they’ve been edited and aligned together, bleeding directly from one to the next except where the band has made the choice not to, as with “Rough Eyed J.E.R.K.S.” and “Open the Door for Water,” which follows and is where a vinyl side A and B would split.
Crespo mixed and mastered, and regardless of how much is going on at any given point, whether it’s a piece like “Liar,” which grows relatively minimal in its middle, or “Winged Seeds” with its central guitar conversation. Much of the material is pastoral even before the pedal steel comes in, and The High Desert Sessions, though it goes a number of places Abronia haven’t gone before in terms of actual sounds being made, is consistent atmospherically with Map of Dawn, 2020’s The Whole of Each Eye (review here) and 2017’s Obsidian Visions/Shadowed Lands (review here). The basic fact of the matter is that their style is open enough that they can go where they want and have it fit. If nothing else, The High Desert Sessions argues that decisively.
But there is, of course, more in the pieces themselves. The nine-minute opener/longest track (immediate points) “Moving Furniture” is an obvious standout and focal point. Where most of The High Desert Sessions could be called interlaced snippets, pieces of jams edited together to create a varied flow across the two sides of the whole work — semi-raga second track “Thrushes” drone-meditating its way into the start of “No Time for a Fire,” the many fadeouts and -ins of side B as “Target Practice” moves from its maybe-a-scream and percussive ritualizing to the mellower and post-rocky “Barely a Season,” which feels more like it could be built into a proper Abronia ‘song,’ with Morricone flourish in the guitar and solidified bass and percussion beneath — and that methodology comports with the off-to-where-people-aren’t narrative behind the record’s making. They may well have had to relocate a couch or two as they got started, and for sure “Open the Door for Water” is the kind of thing one might find on a note or a printed sheet at an AirBNB off in the high desert, but “Moving Furniture” also clues the listener into the personality of the release, which is fortunate since it comprises about a quarter of its runtime.
Listen hard (with those headphones on) and you might hear someone yell ‘stop!’ at 7:43 amid the low-key wash of drones and chimes and various obscure instrumentation — instrument-wise, there is a lot on The High Desert Sessions that could be one thing or could be another, the band employing the usual sax and pedal steel as well as berimbau, dobro, banjo, bowed dulcimer, acoustic and electric guitars, maybe a keyboard in there? — but the song brings itself down gradually in thick-sounding cymbals, maybe-vocal and other drones, and a final move into more urgent big-drum thud, and a couple vocalizations before the serenity of “Thrushes” takes hold.
The experimentalist ethos becomes part of The High Desert Sessions‘ appeal, and whether one sits and picks apart each individual movement, the two-minute “Artemesia” with its rhythmic-pause lyrics, wavy guitar and pedal steel flourish and sudden rise of tape hiss at the end, or the crash-start “Rolling Mass” likewise feeling more ‘song’-ish with a plotted-seeming guitar figure at its core following the drum march, or lets the procession from one to the next hypnotize and carry through the full LP stretch — if you listen digitally or got one of those CDRs, you don’t even have to flip sides; nothing against tapes or vinyl — Abronia reward the experience.
But as to what’s making the string-ish sound in “Rough Eyed J.E.R.K.S.,” for example, I have no idea, though if you took a bowed dulcimer or a berimbau — and ran it through some pedals and were recording it live to an 8-track tape along with some organ and cymbals and drone, it might indeed end up so folkish and biting in the finished product. One way or the other, the bottom line is The High Desert Sessions gives a showcase to the experimental side of what Abronia do, letting listeners perhaps have a deeper look at their process, or at least how they work together with a single creative goal in mind. That it stands so well on its own as a full-length outing and does so much to complement their other work should be taken as another sign of how singular this band is becoming. The kind of outfit who can make moving furniture sound good.
Abronia, The High Desert Sessions (2023)
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