Album Review

Our Brother The Native – Sacred Psalms

• 16th May 2009

Sacred psalms is the fourth long-player to be release from Californian & Mitchigan based geniuses / mentalists (depending on your taste in music) Our Brother The Native. The trio have returned with a ten track slab of no-boundaries, imaginative experimental ‘noise music’ that has already won them countless fans in the past. With an instrumentation that boasts of vocals, guitar, saxophone, banjo, organ, synth, piano, drums, other percussion and electronic programming, it is fair to say that Sacred Psalms makes for a beautifully individual blanket of sound with layers upon layers of melodies, rhythms and intriguing noises. On this record in particular, I feel that Our Brother The Native have really found and embraced their own identity and have therefore put their own unique, bleak and occasionally slightly disturbing sound to their music.

The sparse ‘Dusk’ is a classic example of this, and sees the band take the listener on a journey from unnerving, tense yet somehow relaxing sounds that are difficult to describe that very gradually crescendos into a mêlée of rhythmic percussion, apologetic, sincere vocals and comforting layers. This is as close to ‘crying’ as music can be. Another landmark track of Sacred Psalms is ‘Child Banter’; overall more upbeat and busy than many of the other tracks, it makes for an interesting listen upon combining vocal samples and a manner of all different screeches, thuds, whirrs, guitar riffs and disorientating noises. From the clanking percussion of ‘Behold’ to the gentle serenading of ‘Endless Winter’ to the euphoric out-of-body climax of ‘Well Bred’, Sacred Psalms offers the listener an opportunity to escape musical pre-conceptions and rules and to embrace what is perhaps one of the most natural-sounding and free yet well organised records that they will ever hear.

Making the likes of Radiohead’s infamous Kid A sound like predictable radio-friendly pop, Our Brother The Native‘s ‘Sacred Psalms’ is unlikely to feature heavy daytime radio airplay, but that is for me, the best thing about this band – you just don’t care; it takes the listener back to a simpler time of life when good music was loved rather than analysed and embraced rather than target marketed. A welcome break from the expectations of modern music.