M. Craft: Blood Moon

Music made with ghosts haunting songwriters in isolation continues to take form in magical ways. O.K. Computer and For Emma, Forever Ago embody the indie rock version of the Vincent Van Gogh suffering artist archetype. In Radiohead folklore, the band made the album 40 miles away from any known population source with nothing more than electricity and a landline. Justin Vernon ventured into a “cabin in the woods” to record his omnipresent album about heartbreak and relationship discord. Even The Onion jumped in on the romantic ideal featuring in its full glorious satire a man, a guitar, and a 4-track recorder to create the “shittiest album anyone’s ever heard”.

What distinguishes M. Craft’s third album Blood Moon from other albums made in seclusion is timing. Certainly, making an album in the Mojave Desert three-hours outside of L.A. is nothing new. Arctic Monkeys made part of Humbug there while Josh Homme has created stoner opuses with Kyuss under the same skies. Unlike the millstone-around-the-neck heavy aforementioned predecessors, Blood Moon is a quiet album made at a time when everything else churned out these days comes with pomp and circumstance at wake-the-dead volume levels. “New Horizons” opens like an orchestra fine-tuning their instruments before the performance begins. Once the strings and piano tether together note for note, Craft’s strength then emerges as an artist: he prides himself on each song’s arrangement more so than the obtuse singer-songwriter category he occupies.

Singer-songwriters delight in metaphorical song titles, and “Love Is the Devil” is no exception. Craft inverts the title in the lyric, and he appears to take the vintaged approach to love rebuked. He ties the concept to something larger than his own experience during his own relationship’s demise, reflecting how love “[R]ises beneath us/And falls from above”. Unlike other musings in the Songbook of Love’s Despair, “Love Is the the Devil” closes with a choir repeating the metaphor with a hint of hope within its resignation. Craft’s understated vocals in the tradition of a subdued John Lennon or Iron and Wine’s Sam Beam on every song in his catalog lingers in the background, and it lacks the power of Sufjan Stevens’ recent poignant familial vignettes and Will Oldham’s fragile reflections on Appalachian life. What he lacks in lyricism he makes up in symphonic indescence.

Solitude sweeps over “Morphic Field”, a song that begins like Chance Music, until spectral statements briefly appear before precipitously disappearing. M83 atmospherics reminiscent of “You Appearing” from Saturdays=Youth mark the album’s strongest track, “Where Go the Dreams”. A lament, Craft lifts his voice into thorny textures, meeting the solemn strings and the blocked piano chords with grace and humility. Craft takes sonic risks in a crowded singer-songwriter genre damned to force words to neatly fit in each song. What happens instead is that each song moves with greater ease not chained to syllables or clever rhymes.

Twice the risk equals twice the danger. Blood Moon floats in and out of time, staining the memory with alluring melodies, but not much else. Songs emerge and disappear. The only thing remaining at Blood Moon‘s conclusion is a welcomed guest who leaves a strong impression but you can’t remember his name.