Taking its name from novelist Jack London’s 1904 seafaring adventure, Sea Wolf has evolved organically from its hermetic origins in Alex Brown Church’s living room into a muscular, full-bodied musical entity with passion to burn. After adopting the sobriquet, Church burst onto the music scene in two-fisted fashion with the EP, Get to the River Before It Runs Too Low, and the subsequent full-length debut album, Leaves in the River, about which Interview magazine observed, “His music is both erudite and unvarnished, a blend of swirling melodies, literary balladry and damaged art-rock composition.”

And now, Church’s singular vision has led to the creation of the eloquent and expansive new album White Water, White Bloom, which not only fulfills the immense promise of the initial musical diptych but conjures up its own cosmology. This is one of those rare and mysterious records wherein, the first time you hear it, you can’t shake the feeling that it’s always been part of the soundtrack of your life. You intimately know its ups and downs, its melodies and cadences, its settings and characters.

“I couldn’t have known beforehand what the next record would sound like,” says Church, “but I did know I wanted it to be bigger, with a band feel, rather than another series of intimate confessionals.”

A song cycle set against the changing of seasons, this timeless work unfolds like an epic poem, yet resonates with thematic elements that speak, elliptically yet unmistakably, to the world we live in. Pulsing with evocations of nature at its most elemental, Church’s songs are flooded with vivid imagery, carried along on torrents of sounds as majestic as a mountain stream swollen with the bracing, crystalline runoff of spring’s first warming breath. What’s more, he sings these songs with newfound power, the result of extensive roadwork behind Leaves in the River, while deepening the mesmerizing expressiveness with which he made his initial mark.

Opening track “Wicked Blood” begins with what sounds like an orchestra tuning up before surging to glorious life, the rhythm section shaping itself into a propulsive groove accented by delicate piano notes, carrying along the opening chapter of the saga: “We met in the East/ poured in like a flood,” Church begins, shadowed by the breathless wheeze of an air organ, “You’re the whispering kind/dark sapphire blood/A vision of veils/all shimmery white/like a backdrop of sails/all aglow from the light/of the wonder behind/at a starry night.” And with that, we’re off into an adventure of cinematic immediacy, as befits the sensibility of this onetime film student, who’s clearly found his natural medium of expression.

“Lyrically,” says Church, “I like to incorporate what one would construe as classic imagery, and even infuse the songs with elements of mythology, but also delve into more contemporary themes. I’m interested in the way words look and feel, not just when you hear them but also when you read them.”

Church’s verbal acuity is mated with bold, vibrant soundscapes set off with thundering drums, stabbing, reverb-soaked electric guitars and ghostly keyboards, resulting in such memorable pieces as the mythological tale “Orion & Dog,” ornamented with strings right out of a John Ford western; the folk-noir fable “O Maria!”; the surging title song, burning with Byronic heat; the fever-dreamscape “Spirit”; the muted, idyllic, “The Orchard”; the Dylanesque roundelay “The Traitor”; and the closing “Winter’s Heir,” with its life-embracing denouement.

“When I write a song,” says Church, “for me it’s always associated with a specific place and time. For example, ‘Orion & Dog’ was written during the summer, and ‘Winter’s Heir’ is about coming out of the long Montreal winter and experiencing a sense of rebirth.”

The album has a back story: “I met and fell in love with a girl in Montreal while on tour with Irving, and just before signing with Dangerbird,” Church recalls. “And then, while touring behind the Sea Wolf record, I spent most of my time off in Montreal with her. Apart from ‘Wicked Blood’ and ‘O Maria!,’ which I wrote in Los Angles, everything on White Water was written in Montreal, holed up in our little apartment, a block away from the river. That was all of last fall, winter and spring, so I was very much influenced by that experience, and a lot of the record is set there in my immediate surroundings, along with remembrances of being home on the West Coast.”

White Water, White Bloom was recorded at the Omaha studio of Mike Mogis (Bright Eyes, M. Ward, Monsters of Folk), with Church handling vocals, acoustic and electric guitars, as well as some of the air organ and pump organ sounds that were such a big part of the sonic signature of the earlier records. Joining him were the three core members of the six-piece Sea Wolf touring lineup: keyboardist Lisa Fendelander, bassist Ted Liscinski and drummer Joey Ficken. The remaining slots were filled by Mogis on lead guitar and an assortment of other instruments, with his Bright Eyes cohort Nate Walcott filling the role of the cellist, arranging strings for a quartet, sometimes working from cello parts originally created by Catherine Odell, who’d been part of the initial Sea Wolf touring lineup, with Church’s input.

They arrived with a full set of song demos, providing a detailed blueprint for their subsequent expansion into widescreen anthems that reshape the classic aspects of traditional folk, folk rock and chamber pop—but these bucolic elements are intercut with aggressive bursts of raw emotion sharpened to a serrated edge—making for a rich, vibrant sound that is virtually unprecedented.

Church is working in the most personal of mediums, and that results in constant self-questioning. “Every time you make a record,” he says, “you invariably think, ‘Oh, I wish I’d done this differently,’ or ‘Next time I want to do this.’ But if you get to the point where you don’t think that, then it’s time to quit. In terms of aspirations, as long as I’m constantly having new ideas and finding new places to explore with the music, I’ll be satisfied.”

The Avener
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pierre.delorme@miala.fr

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Biography :

It came as quite a shock when The Avener’s Fade Out Lines rocketed to number 1 in the German iTunes charts. It had been a long time indeed since a French artist had achieved that kind of success in Germany, especially with such a startling single. The triumph of Fade Out Lines opened a door onto a unique and yet instantly familiar world. Its irresistible, sophisticated rhythms conjured up a dual image of lovers ending up on the quays of the Seine at daybreak, and of an urban club funk beat.
Since then, the single’s phenomenal success has proved contagious, confirming The Avener’s prime intention: to travel the frontiers between genres, periods and styles; between the music we listen to and the music we dance to; between underground and high-end pop. As The Avener says himself: “Fade Out Lines is hard to define. It’s blues with jazz, folk and funk influences, and electronic instruments. It has feelings, emotion and nostalgia, but a lot of energy, too.”
It perfectly reflects his upcoming album, The Wanderings Of The Avener, a sophisticated electro manifesto in the spirit of St Germain and his Boulevard’s nu-jazz sampling, reconciling the styles of Moby and Wankelmut, King Britt and Cassius...
The ghost producer of many club hits, Tristan became The Avener when he decided to re-embrace the pleasure of music for its own sake, his early love of piano and melodies, his rich, eclectic, multilayered musical culture and deep house – an antidote to the mechanical chill that has crept into electro over the last few years.
Tristan shut himself away in the studio for months. “I began to rework old tracks that went unnoticed at the time, giving them a more modern feel...” He was determined to achieve a perfect balance: a mixture of acoustic and electro combining songwriting science with the intuition of a dance-floor specialist. And while The Avener wrote his own music, The Avener also covered Sixto Rodriguez, John Lee Hooker, Mazzy Star, The Be Good Tanyas, Andy Bey and Adam Cohen in a mosaic of seminal blues, underground folk, nocturnal pop, ironic rock and the work of forgotten artists from the 70s and 80s, exploring secret paths of memory. His sampling of Phoebe Killdeer & the Short Straws’ The Fade Out Line, a foretaste of the album, was quietly uploaded in summer 2013. It steadily gathered momentum by word of mouth in France before going massive in Germany and then all around the world.
The Avener’s delicate, radiant style has been welcomed as a So French Touch of Elegance and acclaimed as the missing link between harmonic emotion and the urge to dance worldwide. Confirmation of this triumph looks certain with the release of his first album, The Wanderings of the Avener, out on January 19, 2015.

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