Chris and Thomas – Land of Sea

The sleeve of Chris and Thomas’ new album Land of Sea folds out to reveal one of those textbook American desert scenes: rocks in the foreground, an arid panoramic stretch of ground littered with dry plants, and round bolderish mountains in the background, not so much looming over the flat land as providing sudden relief from it. The intention is, presumably, to show that the music they’ve made is Americana, acoustic, country-ish – in short the kind of music you would associate with such landscapes. A cursory reading of the sleeve-notes would probably bolster this impression, with credits for pedal steel and banjo joined by photos of dobros, mandolins and acoustic guitars.

They do themselves an injustice. When you hear their music, the places that come into your mind are less specific because they are so varied. Their music creates impressions of Californian sunshine, New York coffee house, northern badlands, deep canyons, and yes, the desert too. But when they sing, it is difficult to get beyond a picture of the two of them sitting opposite each other separated by one microphone, trying their hardest to meld their voices into one musical entity.

The album opens with its title track, and a picked acoustic bass line which isn’t quite sure if it wants to be traipsing across the desert or funking it up in a jazz bar. A precisely played mandolin riff adds a brief hint of menace, before Chris and Thomas’s voices enter the fray – one high-pitched and yearning, the other baritone but wanting to be lower, the two travelling towards the centre of your listening space, there to merge. Their harmonies don’t offer different rhythms – they sing the same thing as each other – it just so happens they have different ranges. When one’s melody soars, both soar. When one ups the emotion after a dramatic pause, the other does too. But it feels good - they’re sleeping under the Milky Way they say, just like yesterday, and despite the mandolin continuing to add its edgy counterpoint, the song itself does more to relax you than make you want to dance.

Matters astronomical seem to be weighing heavy on their minds actually – in Bettin’ on the Moon, the moon seems to be some sort of comfort, a source of support, at a time of changing frontiers and smoking trains. This time the mandolin and bass are more jaunty and apparently determined to make us dance. But again the singers are so laid back you’d rather just listen. They seem equally capable of tight, close harmony, and distant treble-meets-bass union, and both work. In You’re the One I Want, the latter style is used, and this time the story is more straightforward: you’re the one I want, you’re the one I need, proclaims the chorus, and sure we’ve heard it all before, but as the chorus shifts to minor, Chris and Thomas bring their harmonies to a fleeting but deeply affecting jarring cadence, and when they come out of it, you realise that what you really heard was impossibly sweet. And what they’re doing is reassuring you, because their words tell a sad story: “It’s hard to make the morning last, hard to keep the dreams you had, hard to let the love inside your heart”. Their sonorous singing and just-right harmonies say, the words are true, but it’s the same for us all…don’t worry.

The picture of the two singers – who are also billed as being responsible for the guitars, mandolin, banjo, dobro and piano – singing away like Don and Phil is blurred somewhat by my lack of knowledge about them. I know one of them is American and the other is German; I know they have a pretty rubbish name for their duo, if we’re being honest; but I don’t know which is which in the photos, and I don’t know who is the main player of which instrument. The primary feature of another of the album’s stand-out tracks, Isn’t That So, is the rhythmic and wonderfully precise bluesy guitar line, and I cannot picture who’s playing it. In a way this adds to the enjoyment of the music, and makes it even easier to just listen to the thing – without trying to associate it with a particular place or put it in the context of specific musicians – “ooh, isn’t such-and-such a good guitarist? He played session work for [insert famous name here] you know”. This song is over far too quickly – I suspect that when performed live it’s a much longer showcase for whoever plays that guitar line.

The most visually evocative song on Land of Sea is Riversong, and, at the risk of harping on about this, it really doesn’t conjure up images of that barren desert. This song is about a river as representative of what you find, what you discover, what you learn, if you keep moving. “Where the river ends, where it starts, where it goes / How the river bends, what it sees, and what it knows / Singing through the land of a sea…”. We don’t know what the river holds until it has flowed on by, they say, and you know they’re not just talking about the river. Don’t let things, people, opportunities, slip through your grasp – take what they have to offer.

Well, Land of Sea has plenty to offer. The lyrics consist of short little tales and pieces of advice which, while not being earth-shattering in their wisdom, make you feel happy that that’s how the songs’ writers feel. It presents expert acoustic playing on a variety of instruments, measured just right and arranged to lend the tracks both subtlety and drama. The bass playing, in particular, stands out as perhaps the most melodic and central bass playing I have heard since Brendan O’Brien’s on Springsteen’s Devils and Dust. But most of all, Land of Sea offers fantastic singing. Both singers have sonorous, plaintive voices; their melodies are catchy and original; and their harmonies, while interesting and well-designed, have an easy and natural manner, and they don’t suffer from excessive structure. Overall the combination of jaggedness and repose is just right, and this is a fine album.