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Brightblack Morning Light's intentions and actions are indeed admirable--they're committed advocates of much more than just drug legalization--but Motion to Rejoin struggles mightily to articulate a focus aside from tranquility.
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The result is severely mellow, but too sensuous--the basslines thick with libidinal tug, the vocals steeped in contented, coital afterglow--to ever get boring.
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Apart from these few times when the band touches on musical history, lyrically there’s still the same ridiculous preoccupations: rugged, Midwestern imagery; new age-y spirituality; rather obvious weather-related metaphors.
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Yes, the style and the evocative mood that positively drips from this record are perhaps its most obvious elements but the spirit that underlies these sweltering ballads is massive.
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At other times the songs--while still enjoyable in a nebulous “go to the light” kind-of-way--simply lose all pretense to distinction, bleeding together in a tonal wash of echoed vocals, tremolo guitar and gooey organ.
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New mexican drone rock duds. Tune free zone.
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With hooked beaks and mighty talons, Brightblack Morning Light rip and gut the carcass of psychedelic rock, leaving it exposed and decomposing on the side of the road.
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Brightblack Morning Light has always been a druggie band; this time, however, the drug of choice is Dramamine.
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MojoIts facinating music nevertheless and extremely psychedelic, with gospelly backing singers, flutes and guitars reaching the listener through a reverb-heavy haze. [Dec 2008, p.104]
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Overall, though, the music is worth wading through everything else for.
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The farther they wander, the more magnetic they become.
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The songs toward the latter half of the nine-song, 50-minute album begin to blur, but overall the album introduces a good, anachronistic headspace to enter into.
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Q MagazineMotion To Join makes the druggiest meanderings of the similar "Spiritulized" sound full of pep. [Dec 2008, p. 126]
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At 50 minutes, Motion to Rejoin's jams drift off into the ether, but that's their whole charm: Surrender to the flow, and you'll never know where the time went.
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Fender Rhodes–heavy groove of 2006's self-titled breakthrough gives way to more discernible melodies and socially conscious lyrics (see "Oppressions Each"), buoyed by soulful horns and backup vocals.
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Lazy saxophone exhalations, lightly swung beats, and female R&B backups answer for the southerly side of Motion To Rejoin's southwestern roots, while that inescapable feeling of finding a way out of a listless hangover is universal.
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The WireThere's not much variety over these nine tracks, but to hell with variety when you sound this good. [Dec 2008, p.56]
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Brightblack Morning Light retain a signature, singular, salient sound and still refuse to nudge their songs forward at anything but a crawling pace.
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It is not hard to make fun of this band, even if you’re broadly sympathetic to their beliefs. But the atmosphere they create in their music is so heady, so insidious, so rooted in their environment and their Utopian ideals, that the whole package becomes compelling.
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Under The RadarI get the feeling if I was just chilling out, their Spiritualized-on-barbiturates grroves might be alright. [Fall 2008, p.86]