Short preface: This review of the Boy Bathing’s debut album does not contain any water-based jokes. However the band is thinking of getting Soap-On-A-Rope for the merch table. I assume they’re half-joking. But you never know.

 

Another band from Brooklyn? Not quite. The Boy Bathing’s self-described emo-folk is closer to the welsh band Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci or LA’s Lavender Diamond than anything else in Greenpoint or Williamsburg. They are comprised of the vocalist/guitarist David Hurwitz, vocalist/bassist Jeannie Scofield, guitarist Dyaln Allen and drummer Matt Bogdanow.

 

 

Their debut, A Fire To Make Preparations, opens with the dreamy guitar harmonics of “The Beaches Meet the Sea.”  It’s followed by the don’t-give-up-your-dreams lullaby anthem, “The Question’s Simple,” and the Beatle-esque horns and bells that spell stately grandeur on “The Apple Is Sliced.”

 

If Hurwitz’s Connor-Oberstery (Oberst-like? Oberstist?) voice illustrates the emo qualities of the lyrics, Scofield’s choral sweetness is a nice contrast. On the beautiful “Thanksgiving,” she sounds as if she wrote a musical score and then sang it rather than playing it. Lyrically it’s one of the simpler songs, and one of the best on the album.

  

The Boy Bathing took its name from a fable by Aesop. But the myths and legends don’t stop there. Many of the songs on Fire share an Americana theme. It’s this mixing of the traditional with contemporary that keeps things interesting. Take the ending of “Leaves,” which repeats a vaguely paranoid lyric “I don’t want to see you standing on the lawn tonight with a garbage can of leaves and a flashlight,” before a guitar passage quotes Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer.” You know Foster’s other nineteenth century hits: “Oh! Susanna,” and “Camptown Races.”

 

 

Toward the album’s end, they speed things up with a scorcher called “The Purpose of a Rake.”  It’s Enrico Morricone playing trumpet for The Pogues. And it’s really good.

 

Fire is not an album lacking in ideas. It’s a big undertaking that only gets bogged down once or twice by the weight of its ambition. “A Victory Walk,” throws too many sonic ingredients into the soup.  And at fifty-eight minutes, A Fire To Make Preparations is a bit long for a debut. But it’s a consistently good one. And they sound so together as a band there is really nowhere to go but up.

 

 

 

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