This is a zoom-in of the cover for the "Alchemy and Trust" LP. Diggit.
DOWNLOAD Alchemy and Trust by Village Of Spaces HERE
Village Of Spaces – “Ovum’s Influence” MP3/download
No need to play hard-to-get here: I’m feeling Village Of Spaces right now. Hell, I was feelin’ them back when they were called Uke Of Space Corners County — though I never had the chance nor the occasion to mention it back then — and their discs would show up in the mail along with other stuff coming out on Corleone Records like a 7-inch from The Body (first vinyl I ever got from a label, bing-bang-boom) and that seriously damaging Mindflayer LP my buddy Adam would have traded his soul for (I ended up bartering him up to a pic-disc of Village Green Preservation Society by, of course, The Kinks. I traded away my beloved green-sleeved copy but ended up finding a purple-sleeved copy later, in case you were wondering.)
Catching up with Village now is nice. Sounds as if time and circumstance haven’t caused them to lose their folk bloodline, which is cool, as freak-folk has died down to the point where I maybe kinda miss it (and besides, despite all the sniping about the genre most people were just talking about Devendra Banhart; there wasn’t much time for expansion and most of the bands moved onto noise/electronic/psych/etc. soon after).
Alchemy and Trust acts as if all of this never happened, and honestly, they were never a part of the whole semi-scene mentioned above. They will keep making music regardless of what’s happening down-underground, and it’s comforting to know that even if my attention hasn’t always been properly affixed to them for a few years.
A lot of people secretly hoped that “folk” Midlake album would sound like Alchemy and Trust. It’s understated yet stately, comforting yet laced with traces of cold that rush from the feet to the brain like shudders from an unexpected encounter in the dark. Village Of Spaces are a bit frosty, one might say. They’re not angry but they’re not happy or even content, either. They sing about notions that get the mind working more than they tell a story you’ll be able to follow from start to finish. Not a good or bad thing, just a reality.
“Hidden doors of mine / So much more to learn / About where the hill meets the sea” … that’s one lyric that struck me. Also there’s this: “Perfectly circular isn’t repetition without change / Unless we join lights friend, a circle’s shadow” … That’s a good start; let’s dig deeper: “Long distance on a Montana telephone / Through Bison fields, and empty rooms / Eclipsing now / It’s not too far from here / To the places, that I call home / And listened to, and answered back, on the telephone.”
That last one, from the rightly titled “Montana Telephone,” hits me like a pillowcase filled with snowglobes because I’ve roadtripped all over M-town in my travels. Shitballz, I even wrote a story about bison via an internship at the Moscow-Pullman Daily News in Idaho, incidentally, but back to the lyrics: They’re a cut above the majority of what you’ll find out there, especially in the folk sector. No Folk Uke-style songs about “shit, makes the flowers grow” here. I don’t always understand what they’re trying to say, but I’d like to think I understand enough to feel where they’re coming from.
Where the arrangements are concerned, my mind keeps telling me there should be a Cocorosie parade of outside distractions going on in the background as Dan Beckman-Moon and Amy Moon do their thing, but that’s just what I’m used to. Once you get used to it, the bare necessities of life make a lot more sense when you’re recording two intertwined individuals with harmonies closer than a pair of tongue depressors wrapped together by duct tape.
Christ, I feel my ability to effectively review music like that of Village Of Spaces has eroded somewhat over the course of way too many abstract releases, so I hope I haven’t lost you on this one. Upward and onward!
