Bear Medicine are from Lexington, Kentucky, and make music that is difficult to pin down. The tags on Bandcamp say folk, acoustic and chamber, yet none of these really get close to describing their sound. There’s certainly a psychedelic element, and a smidgen of classic rock, and a nod to songwriters like Townes van Zandt and Nick Drake, but even these would be misleading if taken at face value. The Moon Has Been All My Life is not plain folk or rock or psychedelica. In a curious way the artwork gives a better impression of the album than any genre labels could.
The band utilize an odd brew of instruments, including the standard fare of guitar, piano bass and percussion, as well as cello, flute, harmonica, mandolin and even circus organ. Opener ‘Redbird’ is an instrumental track which reminded me of JBM but then ‘Big Chief,’ another instrumental, uses flutes to invoke mystical-desert images, and while I’m no expert on Native American music (so this might be a pop culture-induced error), we get the most explicit shamanistic vibes of spirits inhabiting bright star-filled skies and hard flat plains filled with scrub and birds and visions.
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Other standouts include ‘Infestation’, a dark and rollicking number supported by stuttering cello and wild harmonica, ‘Blood in Common,’ another finger-snapping rock track and ‘Sevens’, which a far more gentle, pastoral folk song.
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There’s a strange something that runs through these tracks, and to ignore this something is to miss what makes the album so distinctive. This something is not entirely earthly but neither is it extraterrestrial. It’s more about that feeling of profound mystery we feel when looking into space or considering existence beyond our own experience of it. It’s to do with our relationship with the moon and the stars before we started measuring them and visiting them and giving them numerical codes as names. It’s an album about unanswerable questions. This is captured perfectly on the final track, ‘All You Celestials’, with its lyrics of :
“Didn’t you see how the moon split the sky
and poured out it’s cold light on hollow dark nights?
And all you celestials in orbit display
a circular pattern of waxing and wane.”
You can buy the album now on CD, Vinyl or digital download via Bandcamp.