The Brother Brothers – Calla Lily
Compass Records – 16 April 2021
The second album by The Brother Brothers – Illinois-born identical twins David and Adam Moss – isn’t about to see off the Everly Bros comparisons, but then who’s complaining about that! A collection of instantly memorable songs about everyday humanity, it opens with the first single On The Road Again, a suitably uptempo song about feeling that itch in your feet when you feel you’ve been in one place or with the same person too long.
Slowing it down to a sad sway, Sorrow showcases their dreamy 60s harmonies as they lament lost love (“One day she up and left me without warning”) but look for hope amid the hurt (“Though my heart is weary, I am singing/ That I might find that everlasting day“) as strings caress the tears.
The lazily tumbling The Calla Lily Song offers a lyric about waiting for the rain, an overflowing heart, and thinking of both New York (it namechecks Knickerbocker Avenue and Myrtle Avenue which runs from Brooklyn to Queens) and his new lover playing the fiddle in her apartment that adds to the nature imagery with references to grass, robins, whippoorwills and thrushes.
Another love song, this time to a classic Plymouth car, The Road Runner Song, which may just be the only song to have a warning about literally pissing in the wind, lifts the pace to a bluegrassy fiddle bounce only to slip the gear back for the warm Paul Simon-inflected strum of The Chase, Adam’s fiddle stepping into the spotlight in the final stretch, on a number about how sometimes it is the pursuit and not the attaining that keeps your motor running.
The brief gypsy violin refrain of A Poiquito Doina preludes the cowboy tumbleweeds roll-along harmonies of the longing for love Waiting For A Star To Fall, giving way to another Simon-esque echo with Circles, written about living in Chicago and basically about how “we go through the turnstiles/Over and over again” doing whatever mundane job it takes to put a roof over your head. Turning on the twang and the tempo up, Seein’ Double is a straight-up early Everlys-styled country number about being in the bar, and seeing your sweetheart walk in with another man, quite possibly because the narrator spends all his time shooting pool with his buddies and not with her. And so it ends all too soon with the slightly Lennon-tinged lovely twilight time romantic croon of My Holy Way about that moment when the heart as an epiphany about the fleeting nature of life (“I will look up at the sky and realize there’s nothing but/Just a moment in this universe for us”) and of, in doing so, finding peace with yourself (“I will find a living harmony below my very skin/Oh to never need again”) on that “great and blessed ordinary day”. Blooming wonderful.
Bandcamp: https://thebrotherbrothers.bandcamp.com/album/calla-lily