Wooden Arms
Album: Tide
Label: Butterfly Collectors
Tracks: 6
Website: http://www.butterfly-collectors.com

The six-piece Wooden Arms is on this evidence less of a pop-folk band and more of a contemporary classical ensemble with folk leanings, certainly both in terms of sound and discipline (signalling a classically-trained background, I suspect). The six tracks of this EP together display a keen sense of timbre and texture, which the musicians are skilled in utilising for the benefit of the songs' messages. The often enigmatic songs (all but one the work of band member Alex Carson, the other from the pen of Jeff Smith) benefit from superbly creative string arrangements overlaying a piano base, with a more limited adoption of ancillary brass; add the subtle voicings of the vocal parts (individual and choral/harmonies), and the end product is a satisfyingly layered experience, one that shifts and changes while it develops the imagery it portrays.

The delicate tension of the title track's pulsating high-baroque-minimalist sonatina is perhaps the most powerful demonstration of the band's method and technique, while the seemingly unambiguous December can be heard as much as an evocative sensory depiction of a frozen landscape as a trip-hop-inflected "mariachi death march for a New Orleans prostitute". Vicenarian's insistent progress through its five allotted minutes parades the inevitably tick-tock mantra of life; Noah builds lush and brooding waves of sound to mirror the arrogance of its protgonist, and Fresh Start is a rather beautiful anthem that fair glistens with vulnerability, while in contrast Waiting is a curiously effective reflection on inevitability, built upon a kaleidoscopic riff itself clustered around an inventive sequence of samples.

On Tide, Wooden Arms provide a unique listening experience, one that's both highly distinctive and tremendously addictive.

David Kidman