Lay down in the tall grass.

1. "Creepers". The songs that grow on you after a few plays and become keepers. This is how I came to love TV On The Radio, Arcade Fire, Eels, The XX, Electrelane, Dead Man's Bones, Angus & Julia Stone... a never-ending list.

2. Then there are the songs that have you from the first beat. Like falling in love. They have that elusive something that's missing from the others.

Tindersticks: Tony Soprano watches his beautiful neighbor from an upstairs window. She's hanging up laundry in the wind to Tiny Tears.

Can: dancing under the stars in the Hex River Valley to She brings the rain.

Captain Beefheart: driving alone through the Karoo to Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles.

It's very seldom that a band makes the hairs on the back of my neck rise, song after song.

Enter Timber Timbre.

Performance in it's truest form. In the old days Taylor Kirk would have been a troubadour. Poetry to music. This music could be the unreleased soundtrack to True Blood. It's cinematic, dark and brooding. There are violins, an organ, lap steel guitar, rattlesnake percussion, a discordant saloon piano...

The arrangements are sparse, stripped down, permeated with the sonic left turn, full of sway.

Stripped down, yes, but with moments of lush orchestration and exquisite crescendo. Not one to shout, the man croons intimately about love, loss and the abyss. Not a single note in excess. Even the silences in-between have weight.

This is music of spectral beauty.
Shocking in it's sincerity.
 

It glows in the dark.

Image from Abandoned Theatres, by Julia Solis.