Review Summary: The world is a beautiful place (and I am no longer afraid to die).
Life is hard.
The days are long, and the years are short. And amid this contradiction is the looming notion that everything therein lacks any real meaning or order. And it's a valid question: how do you find your place in this vast web of circumstance and sensation we call life?
All you need is a whisper in the dark. Packaged in 40 perfectly measured minutes. "What Wonder Is This Universe" is the aural shepherd stretching its long arm in search of lost listeners. Tender and reverent in its outreach to frayed souls, but furious with bombast in its love for whatever power there is to truly tie us together. Sowing the seeds of faith with sweeping, sumptuous strings, and tilling the green earth with a pounding percussive procession of the promise of a better tomorrow.
The Soil & The Sun were a much-loved folk-rock collective that only ever drew a narrow audience within a quiet corner of the Midwest. Unlike their folk-rock peers Low Roar or The Antlers, who embrace their existential nature, The Soil & The Sun were adamantly, urgently, even ecstatically transcendental; eschewing regressive, inward-facing fatalism in favor of an honest outreach towards nature and the divine. Their music is about beauty and its ultimate purpose: to bring us together. Such a starry-eyed premise would be difficult to take seriously if it weren't for the overwhelming honestly that characterizes the band's voice, and their dense, vibrant, vivid instrumental flair.
More Unitarian than traditionally Christian, The Soil & The Sun's lofty, elegiac songwriting muses on soul connections between the earth and higher powers - balanced by a vocal delivery that is even more earnest than it is reverent. It can be difficult to entertain notions of the divine - but The Soil & The Sun render it an easy feat, simply by welcoming listeners in with warm, open arms. Draping you in the warmth of friendly voices singing in colorful chorus. Cradling you in a deluge of delicately plucked strings and gently swelling cello - charming the listener into a holistic mindset.
After a patient five minute scene setter in "Through These Walls," "Engadine" is where the album finds its momentum. The voices have been introduced - now for the strong, sturdy backbone that carries you on this journey: the diverse, thrumming, and varying percussion section. It has a worldly quality: mixing and matching Western, Eastern, and African rhythms into a seamless, human whole. For an album as delicate and supple as "What Wonder Is This Universe," it's remarkable how much percussive bombast really carries this suite of humanist hymns. This energy grants a pulsing urgency to the deft, sweeping, multipart vocal harmonies that twist and warp around this album's many highlights.
Among them, each highlight captures the heartsore, forlorn headspace of the lost sheep: empathizing and embracing - but never proselytizing. "You Alone Know" features a gently mournful build of guitar and violin that empathizes with one's heartache as the shifting, shuffling percussion urges you forward with a firm guiding hand - through your grief - into that liminal space between the self and the world at large. Swirling and spinning with the intoxicating thrill of the unknown. It leads you to a revelatory climax that hits you like the blinding rush of light on the dawn of a new day:
"I don't need to recognize - every truth, every time,"
"I don't need a bigger noise - all I need is to hear your voice,"
The string driven tension collapses as the cracked voice in our head is joined by a sweet, richly layered chorus. And in that moment you are finally awake: bleary eyed but sure footed, guided arm-in-arm by the shifting wooden drum backbeat to a question that seems as if it could unite us all:
"What wonder is this universe?"
"In every heart, unending worlds,"
The manner in which this album employs steadily building melodies - mournful in one moment and miraculous in the next - can leave the listener breathless. And yet, for all it's beauty, this album isn't pristine. There is a slight edge to it - some bite to keep our feet rooted to the ground. Little lo fi flourishes are nestled between the tracks and within the bridges that support them. The clacking sound of swapping out fresh audio cassettes, the tinny distortion that adorns the frayed edges of the album's enchanting guitar work, and the occasional cracking banter hiding in the otherwise angelic choruses. All of these elements contribute to this album's earnest nature - allowing even cynical listeners to find a means of engagement with the work.
And to engage with this album is to really appreciate it, because as gorgeous as it is: it isn't beautiful for its own sake. There is a method to the rich, colorful, string-laden compositions, here. To the sweet hooks and complicated chord structures that separate them. To its solitary character and the many choruses of voices that encroach upon it. You see: "What Wonder Is This Universe" is a one-of-a-kind work that actively deconstructs our relationship with the divine while at the same time falling to its knees in resignation - in a desperate embrace of faith's greatest promise:
To be loved.
