Review Summary: Mother taught them something right.
Homesickness is a natural part of life. College students feel it, deployed soldiers feel it, even Indie-Folk bands feel it, though, apparently more than most. With tracks like “Breadcrumb Trail”, “Mother”, and “Home”, it seems apparent without even listening to
Tremble the Sails that Philadelphia band Buried Beds have regressed back to some sort of childhood dependency.
If only it were that innocent...
The first thing you notice upon listening to
Tremble the Sails is Buried Beds’ nearly impeccable musicianship on the record. Each member of the Philadelphia quintet interlace their canny melodies and sprightly, assorted drumming like patchwork to what their album cover so appropriately illustrates. In fact, it almost seems too eclectic to work, yet the color crafted isn’t over-stimulating, nor distracting from the overall experience. Songs like “Breadcrumb Trail”, perhaps the closest candidate to being the album’s single, "Your Modern Age", and “Grandma’s Bow”, are your off beat rock songs that flirt with hints of Ragtime and display ethereal vocal harmonies from the two female members that sound as if they came straight from a score by Danny Elfman, Tim Burton’s long time frequented composer.
Yet, amidst the childlike charms the band weaves with their sunny, multifarious instrumentation, there is a buried sadness and almost foreign maturity that oscillate between the conflicting feelings associated with the inevitable departure from childhood, and the loss of a love, though this is kept fairly ambiguous. It's most easily identifiable in the heartfelt piano ballads “Shepard’s Keep” and “Just Hold Me” sung by keyboardist Eliza Jones and frontman/guitarist Brandon Beaver, respectively, revealing
Tremble the Sails to not always be the bright and comforting bed time story it appears to be at ground level. With the latter and closing track, Beaver croons "don't hold me down, just hold me" repeatedly, building to moments of composed desperation as if holding in a deep rooted bitterness towards Jone's elegy of love, so to speak, in "Shepard's Keep".
As congruent as the band is on
Tremble the Sails, there is never a dull moment. No grey in the Buried Beds complexion. Viola solos, bombastic drumming, bubbly keyboard riffs, even slightly haunting guitar work that can immediately hop back into happily-ever-after-land, suggest that Buried Beds can cross no lines of what is unfitting. No, Buried Beds wear their mother-fixated quirkness on their sleeves like girl scout badges of honor, and you know what? It's entirely appropriate.
