Mary Lattimore & Walt McClements - Rain on the Road

A Closer Listen

Harpist Mary Lattimore has been popping up all over the place this season, from Montgomery and Turner’s Spring Became Silent to Moor Mother’s GUILTY.  An Adult Swim collaboration with Juliana Barwick just became available as well.  Few artists have a scope this diverse.  This month she’s teamed up with Walt McClements to produce a gorgeous suite of edited improvisations for harp and accordion ~ although curiously it begins with a creak and a bell.

The extra elements suggest deeper themes.  The opening of “Stolen Bells” implies the passage of measured time, a concept that will soon dissipate, swallowed up in improvisations that resist the very concept of clocks.  The shimmering handbells provide texture rather than tempo, an experience of flow that continues as the album travels to the rivers and fields.  A pastoral track with a pastoral title, “The Poppies, the Wild Mustard, the Blue-Eyed Grass” clears the spirit of anxiety and celebrates the cycles of nature.  The artists are in no hurry; the piece unfurls as gently as a flower in rising daylight, reaching full bloom by the end as the loops enter a full swirl.

The album’s most distinctive moment arrives in a field recording, described as “an unexpected morning encounter with bears at Lattimore’s cabin.”  The witnesses speak in hushed voices, then play in equally reverent tones.  In other circumstances, “We Waited for the Bears to Leave” could have been frightening or even tragic; here, it is an experience of wonder.  The rising volume of McClements’ accordion offers a dramatic tension not normally heard in Lattimore’s recordings, yielding an edifying contrast.  When the volume recedes, one knows the danger has passed.

As “Nest of Earrings” picks up the thread (“Oh my God, Mary, did you see the babies?”), the bells return – sleigh bells this time, astride a percussive clop like reindeer hooves.  The album was in fact recorded in December, in rain-soaked L.A.  All of the seasons are tumbling together, but despite the precipitation the mood is pure sunshine, like the limited edition sun flare vinyl seen to the right.  In the closing piece, the piano plays a happy melody, the birds come out to sing, and one imagines that further north, even the bears are dancing, gorged on wild honey.

Rain on the Road is the first recorded collaboration between these performers, but we hope it won’t be the last; it presents us with a sound we didn’t know we needed until we heard it.  (Richard Allen)