Post Description

Rock, pop, indie-folk, bossa nova.

There are so many elements to Naima Bock’s ‘Below a Massive Dark Land’ that it’s a wonder they can all work together, but wonder appears to be a common reaction to Bock’s music. That’s because of the risks she takes…it confirms her as a major songwriter.

Naima Bock’s 2022 solo debut, Giant Palm, was a bit of a bolt from the blue. The former Goat Girl bassist delivered a startling, strong collection of thoroughly modern folk songs that leaned into chamber pop, avant-rock, and bossa nova, which seemed a far cry from her post-punk roots. It was a departure, but perhaps it shouldn’t be much of a surprise: Bock was a member of experimentally-minded London-based folk collective Broadside Hacks, which also counts Goblin Band, Milkweed and Gwenifer Raymond amongst its alumni, and on Giant Palm, she collaborated with arranger Joel Burton, who, amongst other endeavours, has directed performances of Terry Riley’s minimalist masterpiece In C.  

For her second album, Below a Massive Dark Land, her songwriting talent and her willingness to experiment with unconventional musical forms haven’t dimmed. If anything, Below a Massive Dark Land features an even wider range of styles and influences than its predecessor. She also decided to do all of her own arrangements, a leap into the dark, which was apparently aided by learning to play the violin. The result is an idiosyncratic, confident-sounding approach to music-making that seems to laugh in the face of the very notion of genre. The way the opening track, Gentle, scrolls easily through its various styles – calling up and jettisoning various instruments, shuffling melodies and moods – seems both gleeful and slightly frenzied, as if Bock is simultaneously finding a musical identity and mirroring the problems of personal identity that we all face increasingly more often in our fractured world of social media and Spotify playlists.

On lead single Kaley, she seems to settle on a big, clear, wide-eyed sound full of big horns and crisp guitars, then everything drops away in a moment of unexpected emotional weight before the instruments kick back in, thicker and more solid than ever. She has an impressive control over the emotional direction of a song: it’s all over Feed My Release, which sounds like the offspring of Cate Le Bon, Big Thief and Mount Eerie. The timing of her singing and the timbre of her voice sit perfectly with the rich, melancholy brass and open-book country-rock rhythm section. My Sweet Body is an uncanny swirl, another ageless-sounding song that touches on contemporary themes.

Bock is capable of channelling classic singer-songwriter tropes with ease, as on the loping, Laurel Canyon stylings of Lines, but she always manages to draw back or sidestep long before a song gets bogged down. Even the bleached, minimal, confessional folk of the bouzouki-infused Further Away contains the sweet surprise of a warm dollop of brass, while the jaunty Age hushes itself a couple of times before picking itself up with a chirpy, deliberately wonky coda. Moving is, for want of a better word, incredibly moving, showing off Bock’s voice at its most unadorned. The tiny, bright Star, which finishes the album, sounds like an anti-folk lullaby.

It’s all about the beautiful and surprising sonic details: the foregrounded vocal at the opening of Takes One splits and fractures into multiple colours, stained glass in song form, while the handclaps that puncture the same song change the mood subtly but completely. And that’s without mentioning the melancholy swath of violin and a folksy section of communal singing. There are so many elements that it’s a wonder they can all work together, but wonder appears to be a common reaction to Bock’s music. That’s because of the risks she takes: the songs on Below a Massive Dark Land play with the idea of structure in such an original way that they end up sounding like everything and nothing else on Earth. It’s an album full of antic juxtapositions and barely recognisable shapes, but it deals with serious themes, and it confirms Naima Bock as a major songwriter.

Tracks:
01. Gentle
02. Kaley
03. Feed My Release
04. My Sweet Body
05. Lines
06. Further Away
07. Takes One
08. Age
09. Moving
10. Star

Staat er compleet op, 10% pars mee gepost. Met zeer veel dank aan de originele poster. Laat af en toe eens weten wat je van het album vindt. Altijd leuk, de mening van anderen. Oh ja, MP3 doe ik niet aan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2nQG8ce1Ag