boycalledcrow – eyetrees
eyetrees
boycalledcrow
Album
Ambient
Liam Murphy
April 10, 2025
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Appreciate the perfection in all things, even in those where perfection hides behind a cracked and broken surface. This is one of the main teachings of the Japanese wabi-sabi philosophy. In ceramic art, this tenet is seen in vases purposely bent out of shape or fragmented bowls reconstructed with glowing gold lining.
And in music, you get boycalledcrow’s eyetrees. Joining that penchant for experimental sampling evidenced in earlier album Mystic Scally, the artist sidles closer than ever before to the pinnacle of their sound.
A comfort in flawed melodies and rhythms runs through the release like kintsugi (the golden joinery that holds broken ceramics together). honeybee stutters like an unsure romantic, caught on one guitar refrain for around a minute as euphoric waverings loom overhead. The artist places the hiccuping glitched element front and centre of a soundscape that really feels like it’s meant to be perfect and smooth. As it trundles onwards it gets intermittently snagged on its own melancholy tune.
In these kinds of excursions, we see beauty through a stained or fractured viewpoint. a blissful day with her is indeed full of passion and wistfulness, as its title would have us believe. But its first half is jittery as if we watch a romantic day on a corrupted file or remember it through damaged memories. The second half strives to bring a warm conclusion. boycalledcrow weighs the disquiet with the dainty so well that the thrumming guitar feels at once quaint and broken. There’s a stumbling beauty.
This cracked beauty isn’t just made of guitar and melody either. The steady but stunted percussion of autumn love provides a proper foundation for the prouder moments of boycalledcrow's wabi-sabi sound. Earthy kick drums push these pulsing waves of guitar forward. To chop guitar with no thought to an instinctual rhythm is one thing, but boycalledcrow confidently edits the ground on which we try to walk here.
There are moments that are defiant and determined despite being couched in imperfection. westbury stumbles in its abrupt guitar sample, but as chittering euphoria and crackling percussion begin to circle, the earthy tones of the guitar loop really do feel positively strident. Here the abrupt nature used ends up shining with purity. The following track achieves this too, the juvenile introduction to kids feeling like we’re stuck in a restaurant of noisy children slurping from cups, but the vision quickly becomes one of golden skies and god rays, with guitar resonance so airborne it rarely touches the ground.
Nothing is perfect. By way of existing in our entropic world, everything succumbs to the imperfect crafting hand of nature. But in this incomplete place, beauty nestles away. And beauty nestles at the heart of eyetrees. The artist has built a project with warmth emanating from its cracks and personality seeping from its uneven edges.
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