Spires That In The Sunset Rise: This Is Fire

spiresIts becoming quite a thing to replicate animal sounds with human voices. But I never heard anyone try to mimic a bee, which is what I think the Spires do in their Bee Forms. The effect is super spooky and charming, and maybe its just me again, but I remember that bees were once considered the guides to the underworld. There's definitely a kind of walking barefoot the Styx vibe to the whole album. They've pulled together a botanical garden of acoustic instruments (zither, cello, mbira, rattles, harmonium) and of world folk influences, but without the educational, bourgeois sentiment of the botanical garden. Its as syncretic as theosophy and it doesn't call its raison d'etre authenticity. We are pulled from the potential nostalgia of anthropology by their name, first of all, which comes from a Baudelaire poem "The Voyage", reminding us of the early, questionable romantic yearnings that accompanied colonial conquest. The album is musically wonderful, literally entrancing, detailed, layered, discordant, haunting, kind of acoustic liquid liquid. Given that bees are now facing "colony collapse disorder" in the US, Americans can probably use some girl-turned-bees to guide them between life and death :: Spires That In Sunset Rise/This Is Fire - Secret Eye/A-Musik.