Brightblack Morning Light's slow-rock movement

As the financial apocalypse looms and pundits panic about abstracted value, it makes sense to step back and think about our inner selves and how we tread in the real world. Ultramellow rockers Brightblack Morning Light's new album, Motion to Rejoin, shows this hectic generation the sound of deep reflection with an emphasis on the planet.

You can trace the slow-rock tendency in independent music from the ultraloud urban masochists Swans in the '80s through to the so-called sadcore groups of the '90s like Codeine and Low. These bands worked not only in phlegmatic tempos but also in existentially bleak tones, arrangements, and lyrics.

Brightblack Morning Light transcends the superficialities of the "slow" label as it strives for something more profound. The group's sound has evolved from the languid demi-country of its rare 2002 debut album Ali.cali.tucky to the haunted, wind-whistled blues of its self-titled second album from 2006.

Motion to Rejoin finds the band redefining languid music for the aughts. Aided by a revolving group of accompanying musicians, guitarist and singer Nathan "Nabob" Shineywater and Rhodes pianist and singer Rachael "Rabob" Hughes make "slow" music in the same way people make authentically "slow" food. Specifically, they do it while living a simplified, rural life as unabashed sustenance-farming hippies in the sticks of northern New Mexico. According to Hughes, on the phone from the Land of Enchantment, the band recorded Motion to Rejoin "off the grid" in the studio of their solar-powered home. "When you do it like that — especially in winter, with shorter days — you push and pull with what the weather and sun dictate," he explains. "That's how we live, so I like to think it comes out in the music."

The tunes on Motion resound with opaque pastoral echoes and a vibe that's best described as deep-woods. The group's broad, crepuscular style reflects the dusky nature of its name, and its songs — with telling titles like "Past a Weatherbeaten Fencepost" and "When Beads Spell Power Leaf" — stretch luxuriously in their outback settings. Like those of its predecessor, Motion's arrangements are grounded in Hughes' bassy Rhodes and the reverberant kickdrum hits of drummer Pete Townsend, which seep into the ether with bluesy guitar lines and whispered mantric vocals.

Shineywater and Hughes seemed to write and produce Motion's hypnotic songs as open audio spaces ready to be explored. As Hughes explains, "Each day as we recorded it, I asked, 'How can I just lose myself in this?' I think in a way we create the repetition and atmospheres so that we can kinda wander around inside the song structures. Hopefully people listening can do that too."

As "whoa"-inducing as that sentiment sounds, Brightblack is disciplined enough with its ambience to keep the songs from lapsing into self-indulgence. Flower children aesthetic aside, there's nothing jam-band about these guys. In fact, Motion extends the group's stylistic versatility by absorbing elements of late-'60s psychedelic soul-jazz and gospel. A chugging, almost percussive horn section surfaces throughout, evoking Yusef Lateef's jazz-blues minimalism on "Oppressions Each" and the Rotary Connection's brand of stoner soul on "Another Reclamation." Nashville gospel singers Ann and Regina McCrary boost Shineywater's ghostly croon with some inspired "hoo-hoo" backing. These accents augment the rustic soul in which the Alabama-raised Hughes and Shineywater have soaked their music, and imbue it with subtle emotional power.

In our time of cynical babble, noise, and damage, Brightblack Morning Light offers a thoughtful sound-poem to the abandoned earth, along with a seductive invitation to rejoin it.