2012 REDUX: Bowerbirds

This week we're looking back on some of the best albums of the year (so far) from the not-so-distant DC archives...

Bowerbirds  - Beth Tacular and Phil Moore are the creative epicenter of this North Carolina band melding ambitious art/pop edge with audacious strains of modern folk...Beth's mysterious debilitating illness and the pair's on-off-on relationship stress behind them, they retreated newly inspired to their hand-built cabin in the woods for reflection and writing songs for their third album // Release: The Clearing (March 6, Dead Oceans) // Sounds like: the stakes are raised but the expanded production scope and more intricately twisting melodic lines never sound overworked or pretentious -- the odd time signatures and harmonies that zig and zag are half elegant artful display and half disarming, charming freak-folk fest...ahh, if only Prada made bib overalls...watch the fine EPK below...

Quote: "There’s definitely an acceptance, or a coming to terms with things as they are. That includes accepting that everything will end one day: we will all die; we will lose all our relationships, either by death or breakup...Death and impermanence were looming large in our consciousness these last few years, and thoughts of death tend to have a clarifying and freeing effect on a person..." - Phil Moore // What we like: "In the Yard" is an irresistible jumble of off-kilter rhythms, snaking chord progressions, layers of synths and Tacular and Moore's heavenly harmonies..."Hush" skitters and flits with ragged, meandering guitar lines floating with Tacular's celestial voice atop a simmering cacophony of seemingly random beats..."This Year" plays out like a tipsy British folk tune that suddenly runs smack into a wall of tumbling prog/pop drama... 

Bowerbirds - "In the Yard" (from The Clearing)

Bowerbirds - "Tuck the Darkness In" (from The Clearing)