Wreathes – Wreathes

Wreathes – Wreathes

Urfolk

Label – Pesanta Urfolk

01 Odes
02 Bones of love
03 The Reigns
04 Speech of the tides
05 The great gate
06 Blessed exits

Let’s put away the amazing packaging of this LP, with more than just respect to Pesanta Urfolk for bringing up such a quality to their release, for just a brief moment so we can focus on the album itself. Nathaniel Ritter and Troy Schafer, who work on numerous mutual and separate projects, are the people behind these six great tracks, and on this artistic display, I think they show their tightest, most potent and clear vision so far.

I think that the most remarkable instance of realization that occurred to me while listening to the album was the instant I manage to locate the presence of two contrasts within this album. The presence of severity, even emergency, is the essence of the monumental atmosphere that is ever present throughout the album. It is mixed rather smoothly and in a surprisingly elegant way with an ongoing sense of festivity that manifests through the dedicated singing and celebrating music. This contrast creates a strange feeling. It both calls the listener to come and join the music, while Wreathes, in essence, plays this music to be meditated within itself, keeping the listener at distance in order to be able to appreciate it as a whole. As we, the audience, try being in these two places at once, inside the spiral joy of the music and at the safe distance from the alarming orchestra, this is the exact point of the musical transcendence that Ritter and Schafer invoke.

The six songs do not create a usual album like dynamics. They are all hymns that are being thrusts into the boiling air with full force, as one might expect from this restless theater of emergency and ceremony. The process, almost (or is it there already?) religious, makes this beautiful album (Both inside and out, if I can come back on remarking the excellent art and packaging) memorable and inviting. Bones of love for all of you out there.