Rob Fisher
It’s been a little more than a year since the Avett Brothers’ Emotionalism was released. Three days before the release, Scott and Seth Avett and Bob Crawford played to a national audience from the stage of Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Recently, they transferred from long-time record label Ramseur Records to Columbia Records. But before they did, the brothers took an introspective look at themselves, their past and their future, and laid it all out — raw, slow and somewhat dark — in The Second Gleam. The album, featuring only Scott and Seth, veers away from the produced sound of Emotionalism and harkens back to 2006’s the purposefully stark Gleam and earlier albums such as Country Was and Mignonette. This isn’t a collection of the Avetts’ signature songs — the kind in which energetic banjo riffs urge you out of your seat. It’s something much more serious, much more poignant, much more tacit. The lyrics still have an irresistible quality to them — but instead of luring you into singing along, their powerful messages evoke silence and insist that you listen.
“Tear Down the House,” the album’s opening track, sets the tone for the five songs that follow it. The brothers conjure up old, tattered images of their childhoods in Concord, North Carolina. These slow, forceful lyrics also give a sense that the brothers are growing up, leaving not their memories but their old selves: “I remember crying over you/And I don’t mean like a couple of tears and I’m blue/I’m talking about collapsing and screaming at the moon/But I’m a better man for having gone through it.” Such progression composes the album’s main theme, and with each song the brothers get a little bit older and a little bit wiser. “Murder in the City,” Second Gleam‘s second and most stirring song, lists the same types of doubt and fear that you lie in bed at night thinking about. And although some of these thoughts are somewhat adolescent, they correspond to the band’s ever-increasing fame. The next three songs, “Bella Donna” — a subtle, grown-up version of the “Pretty Girl from” series — “The Greatest Sum” and “St. Joseph’s” all touch on worries, plans, what should be and what will be. They still hold tight to the theme of progression, delivering it with a side of most heart-wrenching lyrics and music. “Souls Like the Wheels” finalizes the album. Here, the brothers leave the ones they know with one lingering message: “Let me go, let me go, let me go, let me go.” The entire album doesn’t let a second go to petty problems. Second Gleam is the Avetts’ secret diary — it stores all the emotions, all the adolescent fear, all the dreams and all the reality of their lives. But just because you won’t really be able to belt out the lyrics in the car doesn’t mean it’s not expertly made. The brothers have poured their hearts out into 20 minutes of the most soulful music you’re likely to hear for a while.