Lost In The Trees
Dense clusters of piano sound, and A Church That Fits Our Needs, the second album by North Carolina group Lost In The Trees, is underway, announcing itself as a work of vaulting ambition, a cathedral built on loss and transformation. In the summer of 2009 Ari Picker – writer, composer, and architect of the band – lost his mother, an artist in her own right, when she took her own life. Picker was in the midst of releasing his band’s debut album, All Alone in an Empty House, a collection of folk-inflected songs that surprised with its orchestral arrangements, to an acclaim usually reserved for seasoned veterans: “both heart wrenching and beautiful,” said Paste, while the Huffington Post called the album “spellbinding in its musical ambition, touching in its intimacy, and often overwhelming in its emotional honesty.” Picker took the loss of his mother and set about transforming the events into a tribute, composing, writing lyrics, his mother’s picture above his writing desk: the same picture that now graces the album’s cover. “I wanted to give her a space, in the music, to be, and to become all the things she didn’t get a chance to be when she was alive.”
The result is A Church That Fits Our Needs, an album that can stand beside musical journeys like Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night and Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago. Picker’s astonishing voice – an instrument that veers from Carl Wilson’s emotional purity to the otherworldly abstractions of Thom Yorke – opens our window into this intensely emotional music. While this might sound like a somber affair, A Church That Fits Our Needs is anything but. Picker, a classically trained composer, has Shostakovich and Stravinsky at his fingertips, but the music on this album speaks just as much to his love of Phil Spector and old film scores. Above all this is pop music, in the way that “A Day In the Life” or Radiohead’s “No Surprises” are pop music, seeking to present complex ideas to the widest possible audience. This is the album Picker set out to make, a celebration of the woman he calls a “warrior,” and a testament to the power of music to heal and transcend.
Lost in the Trees made a huge impression on the national press with their debut, ending up as Bob Boilen from NPR Music’s favorite new artist of 2010, and A Church That Fits Our Needs is primed for a rapt reception.
A Church That Fits Our Needs expands radically on the sound of LITT’s debut, with huge new sonics brought to the forefront by Rob Schnapf (Beck, Elliott Smith).
RIYL: Arcade Fire, Radiohead, Bon Iver
TRY: #4, 3, 9, 2
Lost In The Trees - Golden Eyelids by antirecords
Full Album Available Here:
https://www.piratepirate.com/downloads/
More Info Here:
http://www.lostinthetrees.com/
https://www.facebook.com/lostinthetrees
http://www.anti.com/artists/view/78
http://www.last.fm/music/Lost+in+the+Trees
http://www.npr.org/artists/129383450/lost-in-the-trees