Michael Feuerstack – Harmonize the Moon
Forward Music Group – 19 March 2021
“I used to be a singer bumpin’ around the astral plane, pickin’ up astral trash to polish it up again.” On Harmonize the Moon, Michael Feuerstack’s fifth full-length record under his own moniker, we find the Montreal singer-songwriter doing just as projected on the opening track, I Used to be a Singer. From unknown amounts of jettisons to near-space, Feuerstack eddies back with pieces of “astral trash” and assembles them into this ten-song intimate effort. Collecting confessions with a Michael Stipe-like sense of earnestness, he reminds us that “Don’t you know there’s a world out there…”
The “astral trash” that is gathered here is certainly honed and crafted, but not as polished as projected in song. This is an apartment record made with sparse, heart-inhaling closeness. And perhaps it is made in response to, well, spending a lot of time in our apartments this past year. On Call of the Tired, the second single released, Feuerstack invites us in the late-night door as a sleepy pied-piper. He ushers us sluggish dreamers forward with:
I wanted to follow the sound. The call of the weary, the song of the tired, an ode to the weak and uninspired. and the birds belittle your song. They don’t care if the earthquakes rage, they hover in flight printed right off the page
And so, we sleep through the noise like the birds. Another dream coming through the middle of the sequence is track 5 “Harmonize the Moon.” This title-flagship begins dimly with Moonlight Sonata vibes and, in a good way, doesn’t get much brighter from there. Reprising his role as that sleepy pied-piper, Feuerstack lulls us along with “Home alone in early winter, furnace quiet/ dusky shiver. Once the light goes blue, the orange and yellow fade…” True colour emerges in the chorus though:
Harmonize the moon. Sing the tidal tune like the oceans do. Harmonize the moon. Tones of purple and blue, cloud curtains open wide…
As a representative microcosm of the album as a whole, the cool colours do carry tune. In this song, and in almost every other, he washes us through these hues of star-dotted, bruise-tone blends. On Track 7, The Valley, he directly mentions and lyricizes “a kaleidoscope of black and blue,” channelling an acoustic, minor-key darkness a la Mark Lanegan. Still, our narrator here is omniscient enough to punctuate in slight sunny doses as needed. For wise example, see the end of Harmonize the Moon verse 2 where he reminds us, “But summer love is always with you, feel its warmth, let it kiss you, if the sun will allow the passing of time, underneath its eye,” and, in question-lineage on The Valley he asks:
Do you walk along the valley? Tracing the spine of the earth. You’ll be of service to nobody if a slip should claim your solid foot. Do you wanna be the kind of soul who can’t get up when the pendulum swings and knocks you down?
The message is driven to poignancy with the accompaniment driving to. Feuerstack’s vocals graft onto a finger-picked arpeggio and a laser-like tremolo guitar, an e-bow line melting away and then back to the main melody. He has an interesting tendency to end with brief and unusual voice-over codas. On Too Kind, he ends with a clip of children playing in the background. The Valley closes with a brief snippet of what might be a church choir, and You Can Relax leaves us with a slowed-down, drowned-in-bass mud voice stating with sentience “I don’t know what the purpose of this is, but maybe it’s interesting for someone…“
What’s truly interesting about this record is the elasticity occurring from song to song. The lack-of-light lullabies weave in and out of each other like rubber that blends thematically, difficult to do especially with a body of work that is not explicitly a concept album. The greatest connection in bending is the last track Why Don’t You Stay loping us back to the opener I Used to Be A Singer. It creates an album that stays with you for a while, floating back and through and serenely reiterating as needed.
Feuerstack must have a consciousness for this seamlessness when looking at lines from the first track:
Ever changing ripples where the water meets the land. Infinite patterns /regeneration in the sand. But when the tide returns in its own good time it pulls at your feet. soon it’s at your knees. Soon you’re swimming around in it all. Lost in the weeds. Maybe you wanna hurry, maybe you wanna take your time.
And despite this regenerative effect, Why Don’t You Stay is also a sufficient closer in its own right as a contemplative plea. It asks us wistfully, “Why don’t you stay and throw stones in the lake? Time’s an illusion the waves barely moving slowly enough to forget where we were.”
It isn’t a perfect album, but it’s aware that it isn’t perfect. There are only a few quasi-upbeat moments here. Namely, Time to Burn, the only track where drums come through consistently. And on the latter half of If You Had A Dream where a percussion track rears again in congress with pop chorus vocal harmonies as well. Also, Bathed in Light is an overly repetitive waltz, but conceptually self-references claiming that it’s, “Running in circles, spinning in air.”
The cover art designed by Paul Henderson looks like Nick Drake‘s Pink Moon album, which is spectrally present at points. Where Drake sounded intimate in a young and hopeless way, Feuerstack sounds intimate, ageing and wryly sagacious. Feuerstack himself says Harmonize the Moon is “the product of some beautiful alone time,” and it shows.
The whole tone is plaintive, almost bleak yet hopeful eventually. It’s like Cat Stevens, Dave Matthews, and Colin Hay are collaborating on lullabies. If you’re going through anything emotionally at all, you will cry at some point. The lyrics are so wrenchingly on point that a book of lyrics should be a companion piece to this release.
I chose this record for the title Harmonize the Moon, and that was what it was written for; to sing by yourself at midnight in hopes that someone else is telepathically getting you. Ultimately that other person probably doesn’t hear your beautifully written words, but at least the moon is there for your background, humming harmonically along.
Photo Credit: Stacy Lee