Weird Owl

Ever the Silver Cord Be Loosed

(Tee Pee)

Record Review by Alex Pudlin

Space Rock is quite a challenging genre to master. Rely too much on songcraft, and the mysteries of the galaxy soon appear mundane. But go for pure tone and your ship can end up sucked into a black hole. Pioneers of the genre like Hawkwind mastered this balance, but most of their followers have since vanished into the vacuums of time. Space Rock has enjoyed a bit of a renaissance in recent years with bands like Black Mountain and Comets on Fire embracing the sludgy heaviness of this particular celestial sound, and for the most part doing so admirably. Now, Brooklyn’s Weird Owl want a shot to rock the supernovas too. Although they formed in 2004,  Weird Owl have pretty much languished in obscurity.  Ever the Silver Cord Be Loosed stands as both their first proper album and their debut for Tee Pee records. Loud, trippy and stuffed with heady lyrics, Weird Owl aspire for greatness. Yet, although they sometimes reach the aforementioned balance of craft and tone, eventually their songs collapse onto each other, spewing jet fuel all over the listener’s ear drums.

This graphic image is not meant to suggest that Ever the Silver Cord Be Loosed fails on all levels, just as a whole piece. Individual songs have their place, but in sequence, the extended guitar jams begin to blend a bit too much. On “Mind Mountain,” Weird Owl constructs a pungent atmosphere, layering dueling guitars and vocals to create something like Arcade Fire on barbiturates. The Owls reel in their sound on southern rock stomper “Skeletelpathic,” utilizing blues lyrics like “there ain’t no seeds left for me to grow, so bury me under the ground” to good effect. And “13 Arrows, 13 Stars” harkens back to Custer’s last stand for a reverb-drenched bounce through the joys of reincarnation.  These first three songs pull you in, but Weird Owl does not do enough from that point on to keep you there. The remaining tracks all shimmer with stardust and heavenly lyrics, and on their own, any one could spice up a mixtape. But taken in order, the plodding guitar crunch and warbling keyboard of tracks like “Tobin’s Spirit Guide” and “Flying Low Through the Air After Thunder” grows a bit tired.

Weird Owl redeem the album a bit with the album’s first catchy melody on “Phases of the Moon.” But alas, the detour lasts only a few minutes, before Weird Owl descend back into the cosmic swamp for the final two songs of the record. Fortunately, Weird Owl show enough appreciation of the nuances of Space Rock to suggest that they have a bright future if they can muster up some more varied textures and a better grasp of songwriting. For now though, Ever the Silver Cord Be Loosed stands as a testament to the perils of fusing rock, spirituality and astronomy.