Recommended Album: Vulture Feather – ‘Liminal Fields’

Consider Liminal Fields a new lease of life for members of Wilderness. Criminally overlooked in the indie Aughts spectrum, the Baltimore-based band were uncanny in their architecture of cathedral-esque art rock and post-punk that bellowed with tension and epiphanic melodies adorned by lead singer James Johnson’s with echoes from guitarist Colin McCann behind him. Their sound always felt a little gloomy even though there was light flooding through every creak across the three no-skips albums they released between 2005 and 2008, and their disappearance from the scene made them just as enigmatic. Reemerging from the ether as Vulture Feather – now based out of California – the trio featuring McCann (now leading on vocals and guitar) alongside Wilderness bassist Brian Grossman and drummer Eric Fiscus, is said to be spurned by a near-death experience by McCann, supernaturally predicted in a dream by a friend a year earlier. An existential reawakening on his part after a period of creative dormancy led to his desire for connection and beholden to embracing silence, and from that silence came what we know as the sounds of Liminal Fields – a collection of eight affirming explorations on life through a new found focus of intentionality. The skeletal remains of Wilderness are apparent, yet Vulture Feather fleshes and blooms from the ribcage all the more organically to reclaims the sun once-elusive from them. The natural world informs this new state of being in every step, with droning guitars searing across ominous cloud formations in its early moment, only to give way to pillars rumbling and ambling silver linings from the trio’s methodical procession. Once the storm is behind them, there’s a sense of faith and renewal embraced in repetitive meditation, like light washing through all thought, waves baptizing the body clean, and stillness giving power to forces greater than the self. “This is the dawning / Of a new currency / Clear the way / For the rising sun,” McCann’s voice soars across the album’s centerpiece “Monument”, and this time, his art is one with that element.

Highlights: “Inseperable”, “Bell of Rewewal”, “Monument”

Vulture Feather’s Liminal Fields is available now on Felte Records.

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