Review Summary: Liberation at the inky black bottom of the stairwell
”I want to go out there and get my nose broke, I want to go out there and get cut, something that’s going to bring out the hurt, the pain…I want to FEEL that.”
-Dennis Rodman
To experience Great Grandpa's
Patience, Moonbeam is to unlock and unblock a previously stifled tenderness and vulnerability. Over the course of its protracted six-year gestation, the Pacific Northwest quintet conglomerated with new purpose, intentionally adopting a more collaborative ethos in songwriting and spurning the authoritative direction of an outside producer's nitpicks and projections. As a result, the group’s newest creation is a bittersweet and hard-earned concoction of nostalgic daggers, born out of unflinching examination of wounds and tragedy, forces that bind and fates that sever, and undeniable growth on both personal and musical fronts. Gently raindropping acoustic melodies remain as pastoral and comforting as ever, accompanied by trademark labyrinthine song structures as well as some newer and more welcoming friends. Watch with delight as your Great Grandpa somehow becomes downright
dancy in the blink of an eye, jaunting up and down the hardwood planks of the common room like you just presented him with a golden ticket to the chocolate factory. Yeah, we knew you could walk the whole time, you treacherous fiend. In calmer sunset sketches, a softly humming lap steel beckons through an open window down the lane, more enticing than any pie on any windowsill.
Vocalist and principal songwriter Pat Goodwin was quoted as saying “I think we all resonate with extremes and the contrast present in our daily lives and try to express that through our song’s journeys.” Off-kilter rhythms and dark thundercloud choirs may occasionally spell doom, and the incessant shrieking of the newborn in the next room may keep you up all night, but the album’s captivating parlor trick is its ability to stand confidently in fire and brimstone and smile through the rupturing of its eardrums. As one could expect from a record that begins with a birth and ends with a miscarriage,
Patience, Moonbeam shows its cards in the uneasy tension of relaxing into peace and daring to hope in despair. Lyrical narratives pockmarked with juxtaposition speak of the terror of succumbing to forgiveness, the thrills of pain, and the ephemerality of connection, perhaps emphasized most perfectly by “Doom”’s gut-punch reprise of “Emma”. To experience
Patience, Moonbeam most fully is to feel this pain and to be changed by it, to connect with the telephone ringing off the hook that gave it legs to walk across the bridge from idea to reality, to be pushed and pulled by the gravity of the tides, underneath a waning gibbous disappearance, trusting to make the acquaintance of a brighter new moon.
