The saxophones evoke passion but the mood is more equivocal on 2013's
Swim
, the fourth full-length album from Portland, Oregon quintet
Blue Cranes
and their first for the
Cuneiform
label.
Reed Wallsmith
on alto and
Joe Cunningham
on tenor carry the melodic hooks but also wail and howl over the midtempo rockish rhythms of supple acoustic bassist
Keith Brush
and drummer
Ji Tanzer
and the sometimes dark unfoldings of
Rebecca Sanborn
's keyboards, augmented here and there by a string trio or quartet. This is an album with a back-story of life-changing events -- deaths of friends, weddings, new life -- and although
is entirely instrumental and thus avoids telling explicit stories, the significance of these events seems clear in music that is somehow both melancholic and affirming. The album begins with the
Cunningham
-penned "Beautiful Winners," a heavy but nevertheless catchy tune and one of only two on the disc with the core quintet unaccompanied by guest artists. Despite some tricky, angular stops and starts from the rhythm section, it's really an indie rock-styled tune with saxes standing in for singers, with a melody you might find yourself humming later. Among the writing and arranging touches that leaven the track's mood, the glockenspiel-like voicings on the bridge are a nice contrast with
Sanborn
's low-down distorted keys elsewhere.
"Everything Is Going to Be Okay" begins even heavier and more dirgelike than the opening track, but in a pattern not unlike music heard elsewhere on the album, moves deliberately toward a form of tentative and fleeting uplift. After an increasingly intense saxophone solo over a steady cruising vamp,
and
Wallsmith
beautifully complement one another with contrapuntal lines over
's circular chords. The string quartet of violists
Eyvind Kang
Kyleen King
, violinist
Patti King
, and cellist
Anna Fritz
had been employed coloristically midway through, and as the track ends,
' nearly anthemic build rather abruptly fades into the unaccompanied strings, signaling something more measured than a wholly triumphant conclusion. "Great Dane Small Horse," which briefly shines a spotlight on
Kang
during its intro, also ascends expansively, but in its case, takes a sudden turn toward darkness with several full-ensemble pounds on an incongruously dissonant chord at the finish. A similar mechanistic pulse is stretched out across the entire length of the guest musician-laden "Cass Corridor" (a Portlandian take on the district in Detroit?), whose relentlessness -- albeit for only four minutes -- almost suggests that the leader of another
band,
Roger Trigaux
of
Present
, was invited in to conduct. And while the nine-minute "Painted Birds" initially features its own insistent throb, the tune's climax coalesces out of the album's most purely improvisational interlude, moving decidedly away from the indie rockish impulses heard elsewhere. An album highlight for the improvised music fan, "Painted Birds" is followed by album-closer "Goldfinches," another strong track with perhaps
's deepest melancholy through guest
Cooper McBean
's singing saw but, at the very end, a tiny bit of optimism that seems unconditional. ~ Dave Lynch