High Places – High Places

Brooklyn duo High Places are the product of a chance encounter that blossomed into a fruitful creative partnership. Mary Pearson’s sing-speak vocals meet Rob Barber’s mutating, otherworldly soundscapes in their music, which first came to wider attention with their 03/07-09/07 compilation. It collected the singles and individual tracks that had been their output so far, since the formation of the band in early 2006 when Pearson moved into Barber’s New York flat. Their self-titled debut album, recorded during the first few months of this year, sees them develop the themes and sounds into what feels like one pulsing, melodic whole.

The unique High Places sound is a combination of Pearson’s childlike voice and lyrics largely concerned with nature and naivety with Barber’s music, a jumbled concoction of bass, snatches of melody and ambience, and percussion lifted from samples, instruments or ordinary household objects. Within the pleasantly disorientating mess of sounds, you get hints of tropicalia, dub and IDM amongst collages of field recordings. The results are songs that sound intricately layered and crafted that also transport the listener away from the everyday. High Places seem consistently concerned with escape actually; Pearson’s lyrics swing from addressing the innocent, the insignificant, the simplistic to the transcendental and the unknown. In ‘Namer’, for example, Pearson sings about a woman and an old dog that move out of the city and walk around a wooded lot, thinking up names for all the unusual plant and animals around them.

Opener ‘The Storm’ tweaks banjo sounds to the extent that they could almost be mistaken for sitars in amongst the syncopated percussion, over which Pearson sings, ‘The storm carved out a ditch/Which we filled with seeds and earth/And a tree grew’. The theme of trees and renewal recurs through the album, such as in ‘The Tree With The Lights In It’ with its heady mix heavy bass, steel drums and wordless backing vocals provided by Pearson to her own lyrics. Each track builds steadily and mutates from simple beginnings into often quite different ends. Barber and Pearson seem to have this naïve interest in the manipulation and combination of sounds as a means of introspective transportation; Pearson sings, ‘All around are sailing boats/I stow them in my head’ on ‘A Field Guide’ and it starts to make sense. ‘From Stardust To Sentience’ follows to close out the album, all jittering beats and ambience, Pearson’s voice drenched in reverb and, fittingly, contemplating the stars.

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