Railbird: This Bird Has Flown
Railbird This Bird Has Flown
“Bits of genius floating round” is the lyric which opens “Swamp Thing” and it well sums up this Brooklyn based band’s overall musical approach.
Not exactly a rock band, using the word indie to describe the music,
shortchanges them. There’s an aesthetic more in line with The Sugarcubes, or Frank Zappa’s sensibilities when he unexpectedly chose to be a minimalist. Not so purposefully strange as to qualify as Avant garde, Railbird does an odd balancing act with art house visions and pop aesthetics knitting themselves together into a memorable, and truly likable audio soundscape. There is a great deal more quiet space in these songs than most are used to hearing.
Nothing about Railbird is easily defined. Sarah Pedinotti’s voice is at once fragile and tender, confident and uncertain. She paints the songs with a tenuous strength and often a tremulous warble. Words and phrases are often drawn out or rushed together, before suddenly being presented in clear focus. And in her delivery and tones Pedinotti has made herself truly incomparable, as there’s no one who comes to mind to draw musical comparisons to. There are hints of theatrical narrative in her performance, sometimes referencing traditional Japanese Kabuki. In “Kiss the wall,” Pedinotti repeatedly references Shakespeare, “I had a dream last night.”
“I heard that the great books lie/Man Lives but the spirit can die,” she sings on “No One.” The musical accompaniment sounds like a childs nursery toys animated and set in motion all at once in a weirdly beautiful syncopation.
But Railbird is a band, not a handful players merely propping up another pop singer.
Chris Kyle plays lead guitar, angularly and often percussively. Along with bassist Ben Davis rhythm guitarist James Gascoyne, they create the foundation for much of the songwriting to be built around. These songs rise and fall, expand and fade like breath on a cool morning, without the facility of obvious and expected 2 and 4 timekeeping. Collectively they save us from yet another band working out it’s frustrations by hammering away at their instruments mindlessly. And with Chris Carey on drums, all bets are off. He’s a minimalist with an unusually broad palette of colors in his bag of tricks to paint with.
There’s a darkness to Railbird’s songs which makes me think they don’t migrate to sunnier climes in the winter. These stories reveal themselves unhurriedly, and aren’t meant to be understood and digested all at once. This is art that demands you return repeatedly if you wish to fully understand all it has to say. Deeply textured and fully formed, it can seem almost childish and incomplete, but the empty spaces are meant to give the songs and emotions the room they need to breathe properly. “Don’t look at me through the store window that way.” Pedinotti sings in “Swamp Thing.” Indeed.
What the future holds for Railbird can only be guessed. Whether they go on to have an epic multi-decade career or are short lived, Railbird have already made their mark. With no one to compare them to, no clear and obvious categorization, and an obviously radiant sparkle, they are the rarest of creatures indeed. Railbird deserve a broader audience, just don’t try to understand them. There’s no point in it, as it won’t make any sense to you.
