Slow Spirit - That's the Gods Talking
Birthday Cake Records
Released July 26th, 2024
There is a sense of mysticism pervading Slow Spirit’s new album, That’s the Gods Talking. The Winnipeg-based duo—comprised of jazz-trained folk stars Natalie Bohrn and Eric Roberts—describes the release as “an album of evidence in support of the otherworldly” and “an exercise in accepting the limitations of our physical, human existence, yet continuing to dream beyond those limits. It’s wondering, witnessing, and taking note.”
Like meticulous scientists documenting the natural and metaphysical worlds around them, the two have indeed been taking notes. The songs reflect the majesty of the pandemic isolation in an “already isolated town on the edge of a national park” where they were composed as well as the spiritual meanderings such an environment might allow for.
The opening track, “More Nothing,” is haunting and ethereal, yet its repeated plea—“Give me more nothing”—feels less like a surrender to nihilism than a jubilant invitation into Slow Spirit’s sonic world, the song’s airy outro reaching like a long-time meditator for the emptiness of enlightenement. One can hear in these progressions the uplifting turbulence of Patrick Watson and the solemnly whimsical baroque-ery of Fleet Foxes.
“Out of Body Experience,” is rhythmically unsettling and delightful. Built on stumbling 6/ and 7/4 beats that may send you staggering into astral projection, the tune culminates in a cathartic sax solo that is entirely unexpected until the moment it enters and becomes completely essential. The track showcases what the duo describes as “glitches in the matrix we’ve glimpsed in the beauty of nature, light, shadow, stars and those fleeting moments of intuitive connection.”
This kind of magical imagery is ever-present in the poetry of Bohrn’s lyrics. Mundanities become striking in “Mindless Sometimes,” which depicts a “labyrinth of solitude” in which “ice forms in fractal sequences, snow piles up on a Buddha’s head, a cat leaps across a threshold and wanders around out there.” Listeners can sense both the loneliness and the divinity of a location sealed in by a Manitoba winter and a global pandemic.
The title track was inspired by a snowy, socially distanced bonfire with friends, but the verses’ warm acoustics just as easily conjure a parallel prairie plane, where forgotten gods are singing campfire songs in subaudible chest voices and “cracking another Old Milwaukee” like the song’s (human) prophet as he sagely coughs out: “That’s the gods talking, that’s fate, when you’re carrying a heavy load, and the mystery moves the weight.”
“High School Parking Lot” evokes nostalgia for mix CDs (or mixtapes or playlists, respectively, for the Xs and Zs on either side of me at the fire) and first loves, while “Champagne” is Andy Shauf-like in its melancholic playfulness and interwoven melodies.
Restless rhythms like those in the alt-rock-leaning “Runner Fighter” recall the storminess of Grizzly Bear, though where timbres turn sombre, they are always tempered by Bohrn’s light vocals and lyrics that possess the sensitive perceptivity of songwriters like M. Ward and the sleepy bluesy-ness of the duo’s fellow celebrated Manitoban bard Matt Foster, who co-produced the album alongside Liam Duncan (Boy Golden).
Breezy harmonies and the lull of an upright bass on “Where and When” carry listeners back to the sacred space of the celestial campfire—or maybe it’s a fireside jam in the Artist’s Only section of a festival campground. There we might drift off in a tent to “Mindless Sometimes,” gently attaining all that nothing we’ve been searching for as its cricket chirps and trancey backgrounds forge toward sublime emptiness—though, of course, this music is anything but mindless.
- Ava Glendinning