On
its second album, Brightblack Morning Light leaves the lush greenery of
Northern California for a desert adobe in New Mexico. At first blush, there
isn't much to distinguish Motion To Rejoin—recorded in that mud hut using four
solar panels—from its eponymous predecessor. Well, aside from the fact
that there's less of it, just when it seemed like minimalist dubby folk
couldn't get any sparser. But even that's a distinction of note when discussing
a band whose connection with the natural world plays paramount in its
compositions. In songs like "Gathered Years" and "Summer Hoof," something
minutely slower and drier is happening, like a lone heat-wave coiling around
the fingers of Rachael Hughes as she sits at the Rhodes. There's also evidence
that main man Naybob Shineywater brought some of Humboldt's lush greenery with
him (one track is titled "When Beads Spell Power Leaf"), particularly when
things really get to wafting on soulful speakeasy drifters like "Oppressions
Each." Lazy saxophone exhalations, lightly swung beats, and female R&B;
backups answer for the southerly side of Motion To Rejoin's southwestern roots,
while that inescapable feeling of finding a way out of a listless hangover is
universal.