“The new world is coming / The new world has gifts for you,” sings A Box of Stars‘s Macaulay Lerman on the title track of their latest album, Somethinghood. “Poached eggs in the morning, fresh fish in the afternoon.” Consisting of Lerman (guitar/vocals), Bo Malcolm (guitar), Jens Hybertson (violin), Katy Hellman (bass) and Tim Halteman (drums), the Burlington outfit weave what is best described as a sense of complete attention, a focus which elevates what might seem ordinary situations into something almost sublime.
This phenomenon is central to Somethinghood. Present in the desert sky of opener ‘Sorbet’, or a kitchen’s steam and sunlight in ‘Heaven’. And furthermore it’s used as the foundation for more philosophical musings. Take ‘Museum of Light’, a track which uses the underappreciated miracle of hot water as the basis for metaphysical contemplations, and comes to find beauty and sustenance in everything. “My sink spills god when I run the faucet,” Lerman sings. “Hot water holy father I’m coming back to life.”
I saw bankers buying flowers
And babies clutching fingers
Of mothers who weren’t always
But forever now shall be
I saw Catholics praying
Buddhists meditating
Atheists existing
And that’s proof enough for me
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Which isn’t to say there’s no unease in the songs. ‘Jenny When the Blues‘ is marked by a tangible loneliness, ‘Motion Sickness’ by a premature mourning, and the striking ‘Frankie is Alive’ is entirely balanced on the knife-edge of mortality. However, what darkness there is on the record only serves to highlight the delights it holds too, as though life’s ephemeral nature is an inherent part of its joys. ‘Frankie Alive’ is the perfect example, a strikingly fond track which charts the life of dog against a backdrop of news both brutal and banal. Bushfires in the outback, dolphins in the canals of Venice, Ozzy Osbourne opening a chain a gothic BBQ restaurants. The news grows increasingly astounding as the song develops, from extraterrestrial contact to the separation of the soul from the body, all while the titular hero outlives science and expectation.
On the day Frankie turned 30
She became the first dog to ever turn 30
And above packed arena seating
She was knighted in front of a crowd of one billion
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The contrast of catastrophes and miracles is typical of Somethinghood, even if the miracles are not always as obvious as Frankie’s. “The world you know is ending / You can feel it in the quiet,” goes ‘Big Hole in the Sky’, “in the junkyard breeding lightyears / of upturned cars on fire.” But against the apocalyptic imagery, the track operates on another plane. The ground level existence, a sense of love persevering against everything else. The song, and indeed the album as a whole, not only serves as a confrontation of our unravelling world, but also the near divine moments of peace we might still find within it.
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Somethinghood is out now and available from the A Box of Stars Bandcamp page.
