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[POP OUT OF PLACE] In a strange way, the cover of the Golden Bears' second album resembles that of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours. Hear me out. Like Rumours, the art for Write It Like You Find It features two humanoid figures—a female and a male, presumably—against a white background, one positioned lower than the other. Swap the genders, invert the picture, replace Mick Fleetwood and Stevie Nicks with an illustration of a rabbit in a blue suit and a woman wearing a bird mask, and it's practically the same image.
All right, maybe that's a stretch. Still, with Write It, the married duo of singer-drummer Julianna Bright and multi-instrumentalist Seth Lorinczi—the latter a member of the Corin Tucker Band—have made a record of "classic" quality. Write It could have shared shelf space with Rumours in the late '70s; or, in its more pastoral moments, with Fairport Convention's Unhalfbricking in 1969. Which isn't to say it's "retro" in the fetishistic sense, just that Bright and Lorinczi are mature enough as songwriters to make an album that stands outside its own time.
Write It
mostly comprises piano ballads ("How Good"), gentle folk songs ("Wine
and Want") and a few loose-limbed rave-ups ("Do You See It"), but its
best tracks are the mid-tempo rockers: "Lightning," driven by
tumble-down drums and "Misty Mountain Hop"-style Rhodes keyboard; the
slow-burning march of "The Rushes," which builds to an explosive coda.
It's a very adult album—Bright and Lorinczi are parents in addition to
being musicians and husband and wife, and the whimsical "All the Birds"
is a lullaby for their child—but there's a young heart beneath its
grown-up veneer. "And rock and roll, am I not your loyal sinner?" Bright
sings in her strong, sagelike voice on the come-hither "Wine and Want."
"Your faithful child, your eternal beginner?"
SEE IT: The Golden Bears play Bunk Bar, 1028 SE Water Ave., on Tuesday, Feb. 7, with 1939 Ensemble. 10 pm. $3. 21+.
WWeek 2015