BONNY DOON : LONGWAVE

  1. Long Wave
  2. A Lotta Things
  3. I Am Here (I Am Alive)
  4. Take Me Away
  5. Where Do You Go?
  6. Saved
  7. Saw A Light
  8. Try To Be
  9. Part Of Me
  10. Walkdown

Label : Woodsist

Release Date : March 23, 2018

Length : 40:49

Review (Pitchfork) : Sometime last spring, the four members of Detroit’s Bonny Doon fled to a house in the woods of Northern Michigan for a creative retreat near the auspiciously named Mystic Lake. Over the course of one very productive week, the band wrote their second album, Longwave, a sober, spartan folk-rock record with a spontaneous feel. “Sometimes we’ll just go up and bring and a tape machine and record sessions for four or five days,” said Bill Lennox, one of the group’s two singer-songwriters, in an interview last year. Remote in the wilderness, away from their routine, this verdant little album was abruptly born. This narrative is so familiar that it’s made The Onion: “Man Just Going to Grab Guitar and Old Four-Track, Go Out to Cabin in Woods, Make Shittiest Album Anyone’s Ever Heard” was a howlingly funny headline as early as 2011. But Longwave, thankfully, is much less hackneyed than its framing device, and Bonny Doon exhibit less irritating self-seriousness than might be expected of a band that found its muse in the trees. Lennox and his co-writer, Bobby Colombo, bring a light touch to their melancholic alt-country songs, staying moody but avoiding the overly stern or solemn. The surface appeal of their sound—the breezy, imperturbable nonchalance, what Lennox has called their “stoned sort-of minimalism”—has more to do with California than Detroit. Even so, darker tones of despair and casual cynicism come through in the lyrics. “And I should be happy, but I’m not/But I’m not/And I should be grateful, I know, but I’m not,” Lennox sings airily on “A Lotta Things.” On “Part of Me,” they make an effort to derive from the misery a kind of lesson: “Appreciate the harder times/To know what it feels like.” After their wilderness writing session, Bonny Doon returned to record the album at the Key Club studio in Western Michigan, aiming to capture the vibe from the lake house as simply as possible. In this they’ve succeeded: There’s a stark immediacy to the production on Longwave, rendering the band’s simple arrangements and basic chords without a shade of embellishment. They’d much rather use negative space than a dynamic flourish. A less generous listener might hear this album’s loose, easygoing quality as carelessness, and the band does little to dispel that impression. “Walkdown,” the closer, meanders on for three unfulfilling minutes. “Saved,” at nearly six minutes the album’s longest track, sputters into near-silence midway through before picking back up into an aimless several-minute jam session. The press release, tellingly, highlights this almost-flubbed take as “a candid moment that encapsulates the spirit of Longwave.” Their commitment to spontaneity is admirable, even if it’s not always fruitful.

Review (Dusted Magazine) : Bonny Doon has found a natural home on the Woodsist label, where its gently strung out strumming and warm unpresuming melodies sit easily alongside artists like Kevin Morby, Hand Habits and Woods itself. This second full-length continues the band’s languid trajectory, overlaying slo-mo dual guitar licks into organic tangles of sound, overlaying that foundation with repetitive murmured lines and pacing it all, ever so subtly with the distant thump of percussion. Longwave is a good deal less fuzzy than last year’s self-titled, clarifying the band’s slow jamming style and interposing luminous white space where the hiss and static used to be. (It’s the first Bonny Doon album to be professionally engineered; Bill Kibbe at the Key Club Studio did the honors.) “A Lotta Things,” an early single, has a back-slouching swagger in its jangle, a bass and drum pick-up scramble at the end of phrases that kicks off new measures with satisfying aplomb. “I Am Here,” rains down chords on disaffected vocals like a Pavement outtake, but it is noticeably more directed, less slack than first album cuts like “Summertime Friends.” Where earlier tracks tended, endearingly, to drift and wander, these new ones move not faster but with more purpose, as if they have somewhere to get to. Yet while Longwave has clarity and purpose, it has further dialed down the (already submerged) rock abrasion that you could sometimes glimpse on the self-titled. Tracks move at a very measured pace, with lots of space for consideration and reflection; there’s no hint of a drum fill itching to burst through the reticence or a guitar solo that might get out of hand if no one was watching. Instead, you get the beautiful, lucid control of sunshine-y “Saved,” a lovely thing distilled down to essence, but completely devoid of aggression. Some listeners might also point out that pretty much everything you can do with strummy, two-guitar, slacker pop has been done already – and indeed, there’s nothing very groundbreaking about Longwave. Bonny Doon touches on this question of originality in “Saw a Light,” its scraps of lyrics (though not melody) from the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses.” “I had no song/so I borrowed an old one/it went wi-ii-ii-iild…couldn’t drag me away,” sings Bobby Colombo. Still with its slow scramble of strumming, its enveloping aura of warmth and worn-in comfort, its two guitars curving out toward each other like the tendrils of a plant, the song is enough of a pleasure that familiarity doesn’t hurt it. Not every band has to reinvent music. Some, like Bonny Doon, can simply invoke it.