For last year’s Almanac Behind, Daniel Bachman’s third album demonstrating his move into more collage-based soundscapes (The Morning Star and Axacan make up the trio), he turned environmental commentator and delivered an unnerving, dramatic suite of recordings focused on our climate emergency and the potentially disastrous future in store. For When the Roses Come Again, he has returned to the past, with the album taking its name from a Carter Family song and each of its fifteen track titles from the lyrics.
It has been noticeable from 2016’s Daniel Bachman onwards that Daniel has been pushing the acoustic guitar further to the sidelines, and on When the Roses Come Again, it barely features. Instead, an ancient, fretless Hondo five-string banjo is considered appropriate to document this old time music based collage, with a homemade Appalachian mouth bow also manipulated by Daniel using his laptop software (the whole album was recorded in a cabin by Shenandoah National Park). The use of mainly these two instruments as focal points streamlines the finished article and gives it a sleek cohesion. Although Daniel used a collage-based approach for some of his music as Sacred Harp, for this most recent foray, he has steadily honed his style, with Morning Star and Axacan being sprawling double albums and this and Almanac Behind both consisting of fifteen shorter tracks and spanning a trim forty-three minutes.
Best listened to as a whole recording rather than a series of tracks, Daniel does a wonderful job here in skilfully blending his electronic touches with traditional music. The first miniature, Neath the Shadow, Down the Meadow, brings in as many digital-sounding beeps as it does improvised banjo playing, feeling like a brief introduction to the album as a whole. Leaves Lying on Each Side immediately follows with a more traditionally Appalachian-sounding banjo part, albeit surrounded by a subtly more intrusive drone hovering nearby and an echoing effect across the banjo notes, giving the music an eerie, almost doom-laden feel.
The banjo as a key character here is quite miraculous, adding such depth and gravitas to these pieces and acting as the glue that keeps the entire set together. Built from a month’s worth of eight-hour-a-day improvisations, this is a painstaking project, but the end result sounds organic and inevitable. The banjo across Someone Straying, Long Delaying is beautiful in its repetition and leads us into Sad the Parting Down the Lane, a more urgent and anxious fragment that brings in sharp percussion and bendy electronics.
Also important is the Appalachian mouth harp, with its metallic, ricocheting timbre giving the music (like on As I Wander, I will Ponder) a strange, dystopian, sci-fi feel, like a robotic rattlesnake. This more forbidding sound continues towards the end of the album, with pieces like Summer’s Fingers Sweetly Linger blending manipulated banjo with high drones and a steady drum machine backdrop. The fragmented nature of the playing paired with ominous background sounds certainly amp up the unease, which continues on into Someone’s Roaming in the Gloaming, a freaky track with what sounds like twisted fiddle lines bleeding into white noise and shards of electronic demonic voices. Phew!
Further on, though, Happy Hearts that Feel no Pain is more spacious and calmer, although not without its own sense of disquiet running through the sparsely plucked banjo strings. The final song, Now the Roses Come Again, is similarly roomy in structure, this time with the steel string guitar playing some quite beautiful lines over an odd, liquid-sounding electronic effect and the subtlest of echoes in the background. It’s hard to tell whether the roses coming again is an optimistic return or not, but the sounds are spellbinding. As I similarly mentioned when reviewing Almanac Behind, the music here sounds even more focused again, forgoing radio sounds and leaving field recordings to a minimum, both details enhancing the music and strengthening the overall sound coming through. I love this whole quartet of recent work from Daniel, starting in 2018 with Morning Star, and I think it hangs together as a canon in its own right very well, but When the Roses Come Again is the strongest album of the bunch.
Pre-Order via Bandcamp (Ltd Edition Black or Red Vinyl, CD and Digital) – https://threelobed.bandcamp.com/album/when-the-roses-come-again