There is something both elemental and ethereal about the music that greets you as the needle drops on this debut record from Flutes & Low, something both bucolic and melancholic, as if it is music not created to be merely heard by human ears, as if it is a sound that is part of the landscape itself.
“Long Winter” perfectly sums up the fragility and chill that run through the album, a song full of bleak yet beautiful spaces, like the long chill hanging over the Midwestern landscape that the duo, Ben Pichler and Cambria Haen, call home.
If it is an album built on poise and glorious understatement, there is still a natural, unforced energy running through many of the songs, balancing the often ambient sense with a mix of drifting and driving momentum. “Frelow” moves on heady, hazy textures, billowing sonics that remain opaque yet palpable, like the morning mists hanging in the air, and “To Glass” has a robust groove on which the pair hang seductive sonics, not least their gorgeous vocals, a sound that defines this spacious collection of songs.
And, although it is hard to pick one stand out song in this album of stand out songs, but “Requiem in B Minor” must be mentioned, a gently galloping rythmn cocooned in the deftest of sonic touches, a seven and a half minute opus of understament and restraint that is so naturally engaging, so contagious in its beauty and musical brevity that it seems to both pass in a heartbeat and remain a constant.
Debut albums, more than any subsequent release, need to make a statement. Lay Fallow not only does that, but it does so in the most elegant, and indeed, musically eloquent way possible.
