The Arcadian Wild

An Album Review of "Welcome"

Photo courtesy The Arcadian Wild (www.thearcadianwild.com)

Dear Friends,

Step into my study. Shall I fill you a pipe? Pour you a dram? Excellent!

I sometimes get into trouble, or at least create something of a furor, when I do commentary on or reviews of music. But it is that time again, only this time I don’t have any real criticisms to give.

I have mentioned to you before the band The Arcadian Wild (pictured above). Particularly, I recommended their EP Principium, a poetic retelling of the biblical creation and fall story. Recently they released a brand-new full length album, Welcome. I listened to it once or twice and then it somewhat fell off of my radar. It didn’t quite “stick.” Over this past weekend I had a nightmarish “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles” experience and spent a great deal of time in airports and flights that shouldn’t have been needed. And The Arcadian Wild kept me company, playing sweetly in my noise-cancelling Bose headphones that made me feel like I was in a gorgeous music hall sitting right in their midst. I listened to Welcome straight through at least four times.

Let me back up. The Arcadian Wild is Isaac Horn (guitar/vocals), Lincoln Mick (mandolin/vocals), and Bailey Warren (violin/vocals). They occasionally record and perform with a rotating cast of other musicians like Erik Coveney (double bass), but these three are the core group. And the sound they produce is so much more than the sum of its parts. It is truly astounding the amount of intricate sound they create with their instruments and vocal harmonies. Of interest to me is that they do not have a percussionist, and yet their music is perfectly and sophisticatedly percussive, using their instruments to provide complicated syncopated rhythms.

That said, I did not think I was going to like Welcome. This band is hard to pigeon-hole; they are not a straightforward bluegrass trio—not by a country mile. They take musical directions you cannot possibly predict beforehand and it leaves you wondering: what is this song? Is it pop? Alternative? Alternafolk? Americana? I am often skeptical of these sorts of musical “roads less taken.” Are they changing a key or time signature here for the sole reason of just doing something unexpected? Doing it for the sole purpose of throwing the listener off the scent? Or is there a deeper, cohesive plan being executed?

An example, to explain what I mean. Chris Thile, the musical and mandolin savant and front man for Nickel Creek, has accomplished literally everything there is to accomplish on his instrument. Including J.S. Bach’s violin sonatas and partitas. And it seems clear to me that he got bored. Nickel Creek was old news and defunct. I think he still loves standard bluegrass, but since he has completely mastered the genre I don’t think it holds much interest for him. So he formed a new band: The Punch Brothers. It was his vehicle for very avant garde (experimental) music. And I really dislike listening to The Punch Brothers. The “weirdness” of the music strikes me as simply for the purpose of being weird. Thile is looking for something by mixing and straining genres, but I don’t think he’s found it yet. At least I can’t hear it.

So I wondered if The Arcadian Wild was up to something similar. Being different just to be different, rather than because it makes cohesive musical sense. At first that was my impression (which is why the album likely fell off my radar). But after many listens straight through, I have changed my mind. Welcome is pretty much a work of true musical genius. Every aspect except one gets an A+ grade from me.

Instrumentation

Horn, Mick, and Warren are obviously virtuosic on their instruments, and that speaks for itself. The ease with which Isaac Horn moves from playing single melody lines, to complex picking patterns, to counterpoint, to deep, resonant and syncopated strumming patterns is marvelous. He is extremely versatile. Likewise, Mick’s mandolin is a delight, often simply providing the rhythm with bright pizzicato and then moving to exquisite solos. Warren is the same: her violin provides rhythm, as well as 1001 variations of musical color.

All of this instrumentation gets help, though. They don’t say much about the recording, mixing, and mastering process used for Welcome, but I can tell that whatever condenser microphones they used to capture these instruments must be very, very excellent. The tonal quality is exceptional—I can hear the richness of the tone woods. Moreover, I cannot help but notice that none of them overplay their instruments, which is what happens when you have a nagging sense that you need to increase your volume because you’re not being heard. A great microphone will amplify the tiniest nuances of one’s playing, and it is clear that these three were content to live, move, and have their being within those parameters. The result is that even the soft playing is amplified beautifully. Great microphones and, even more important, great mixing!

Vocals

The singing is superb. Not an off-pitch anywhere. And the harmonies are supremely tight. Not only tight, but extraordinarily complicated. They are not just finding “thirds,” by any means. In a few places they hit a sustained three-part harmony that simply takes the breath away both because it is unusual and not what you are expecting and because it is beautiful. Great vocal craftsmanship. My only mild criticism is that on a couple of tracks the lead singer—I can’t tell whether it’s Horn or Mick, because listening digitally I don’t have “liner notes” that tell me who is singing, and they have very similar voices—can be a bit too theatrical with the falsetto. Very mild criticism.

Lyrics

The lyrics are exceptional and varied. The way they “land” some of these stream-of-consciousness bits of poetry into the structured mold of the music is nothing short of ingenious. Take “Dopamine,” a wonderful critique of our modern narcissism of living solely in our digital world. The opening “sing-talk” goes like this:

Hit ‘em with a little bit of dopamine to keep em lookin’

Every second, they’ll be second guessing, trying to meet the

Expectation of the age of information, the simulation

Will be so convincing, they’ll forget that they’re alive

“Forget that they’re alive” is the hook, answered by the chorus:

Wake up and break yourself outta here

Don’t be one of the cold souls who disappears

Stop believing and telling the lie

Why don’t you look your life in the eye?

Man, what a punch line! “Why don’t you look your life in the eye?” Now, if you listen carefully there is so much more happening. Bailey Warren sings a backup harmony line that goes:

Ever seeing, but not perceiving

Ever hearing, but never understanding

That’s right out of the book of Isaiah. Like I say, this stuff is quite sophisticated—so sophisticated that this line is sung as a background line so that the listener is hearing it but likely not understanding it. That is some great artwork. I only noticed because I was practically listening in surround sound on my Bose headphones! I was able to pick it out.

The song “Big Sky, MT” is essentially a piece of long-form poetry—it could be something one of them wrote in their journal during a trip to Big Sky—about a “vision” of a long-term relationship. Musically, the song is incredible. Lyrically, again, it is amazing how they wrangle free-flowing lyrics into the structure of the song.

I won’t bother going through the whole album. I’ll just give a grade. Lyrics: A+

Production

I’m going to gather a number of things together here: recording, mixing, mastering. I’ve already mentioned the recording. Great microphones with outstanding fidelity that shows off the tonal quality and color of the instruments.

But the mixing is a marvel. As I very carefully listened, this was clearly not an exercise in setting volumes and panning instruments to set spots and letting it run. The album essentially plays in surround sound. Harmonies come at you from all directions, including from the extreme left and right. At one point I realized that the mandolin was coming from the left, but I could’ve sworn it started the song on the right (maybe it was vice versa). I listened again, and I was correct. The mixer is moving things around throughout the song, depending on what is going to give the most pleasant audio experience for the listener. This has the effect of keeping the song sounding “fresh” all the way through the track. I consider the mixer the fifth musician—a full-on member of The Arcadian Wild—on Welcome. Well done! A+ Likewise, the mastering gives the whole album the feel that you are in a single, cohesive room with these musicians and they are playing a live concert for you. There are no jarring sound changes from track to track. A+

Now for a mild criticism. Here’s how the band sort of expresses their mission statement:

Welcome. It’s a word The Arcadian Wild hold dear, an invitation to be present, to let your guard down, to share in something deep and divine and communal.

“No matter who you are or where you come from, that word just makes you breathe a little easier,” says guitarist/singer Isaac Horn. “When you feel welcome somewhere, you can be yourself, you can be open to whatever the space and the moment have to offer. That’s how we want people to experience these songs.”

I like it. It’s a strong conviction of mine that entertainment and music is an end in itself, and as such it can be and ought to be an inclusive and welcoming thing. I mean that in contrast to what passes as “Christian” music these days. The art is always hitched to something else: evangelism or worship. It’s solely produced and done for a group of insiders doing an insider activity. The Arcadian Wild doesn’t wear Christianity on their sleeves (indeed, I’m just intuiting it myself); it just speaks for itself in their content. More than adequately speaks, to boot. I mean, a musical cycle on Genesis’s creation account? Pretty awesome.

However, Welcome contains three tracks that are sharp cultural critiques: “Dopamine,” “Two Kinds,” and “Fable of the Times.” They are all great, but in my opinion they should not all have been included on this particular album. Particularly, “Two Kinds” and “Fable of the Times” should not have been put back-to-back on the track listing. At minimum, those two should have been broken up; at maximum, one of them should have been left for the next album. Why?

Because ironically, given that this is an album called Welcome, these two songs together sound quite preachy or at least “scoldy.” They are sung in a happy, smiley way, but the lyrics are pretty punchy. Like I’m being harangued for being a partisan, narrow-minded, deluded person swept away by our culture’s lies. For two whole songs in a row. It tends to make the listener not feel … welcome.

That’s my modest opinion. But no matter: The Arcadian Wild immediately redeems itself from this mild error in judgment by closing out the album on a truly spectacular note. “The End” is absolutely thrilling. It leaves you on a note very much wishing it was not the end.

Our relationship might have started out a bit shaky, but they have definitely secured a fan.

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You can find The Arcadian Wild’s Welcome on (I believe) any streaming platform, but certainly on Spotify or Apple Music. It’ll sound great on anything, but I do recommend higher quality speakers for the very best listening experience.