Austin Sound

The Lovely Sparrows - Pulling up Floors, Pouring on (New) Paint / Sparrow House - Falls

By Austin Sound • Dec 12th, 2006 • Category: Sound Reviews •

Although there is really no reason to put these two releases together other than their avian association, we felt compelled to do so. Both are, however, exceptional debut EP’s from two of Austin’s most promising young groups. The Lovely Sparrows, who was our Sound Off featured artist a couple of weeks ago and will be performing with Shapes and Sizes and the Weird Weeds at Emo’s on Thursday Dec. 14th, offers up a nearly perfect collection of indie pop on Pulling up Floors, Pouring on (New) Paint behind Shawn Jones’ emotionally charged lyrics. Sparrow House’s Falls, the project of Voxtrot keyboardist Jared Van Fleet, shows off his own songwriting skills through a mellow and delicate flood of love and longing. Were we prone to making year-end lists, both of these debuts would certainly be near the top.

The Lovely Sparrows
Pulling Up Floors, Pouring on (New) Paint
(Abandoned Love Records)

The title of the Lovely Sparrow’s debut EP is meant to be a question. In the lead number, “Chemicals Change,” singer-songwriter Shawn Jones ponders over a breezy flamenco guitar pattern that brushes beside Jose Gonzales and Nick Drake, “Can I pull up floors? Can I pour on new paint? / Can I lay down tonight and just forget your face?” The Sparrows’ struggle to pick up the pieces, to cover up the past and start anew is the very essence of this record. With love as a battlefield, “The War Has Seen the Best of Me” harkens back to “Holland 1945” via Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, with a cacophonous collection of accordion, handclaps and fingers snaps, while “Your Flowers Will Bloom” reveals the beauty of Lauryn Steinburg’s harmonies. “Attention Disorder Kid” continues to pile on the instruments, which includes bells, to create the kind of emotional and musical intensity and instability of Okkervil River. While the added layers provide an incredible density to this 5-song EP, it’s the cracks and nuances within each, like Jones’ off-kilter vocals or various missteps during the acoustic finger picking, that reveal the beauty and importance of the past left behind. Now, take these broken wings and learn to fly.

Sparrow House
Falls
(SR)

Sparrow House’s Falls is purportedly part of a larger ongoing project of song cycles for each season, but the six songs encapsulate an emotional falling in and out of love as much as much as autumn’s slow dying fall. Bookended by the looped chant of “give up” on the opening track “Heart Flood” and the muted horns of closer “Last Fall,” the songs sift through the embers of love’s memory and that initial swoon of promise in a lover’s arms. The beauty of Van Fleet’s songwriting hovers in the ambiguity of phrases that could be heard equally as heartbroken or hopeful – “give up” intoning as much a giving up of oneself to another as it does a sigh of desperation. Memories cling tightly here through old photographs and half-moments of breath upon the frozen window or a sleeping touch of lovers’ fingers that become larger than themselves. “Foxes (Sighing Like a Furnace)” matches Sam Beam’s same ability to build upon these silent moments, though the layered vocals and restrained emotion of the songs recall most closely Elliott Smith’s searching sadness. The best track on the EP, “When I Am Gone,” gently burns through a Roman Candle of lost love while fueled by the yearning harmonies and repetition of Simon and Garfunkel. But even as the growing nights begin to eclipse autumn’s days, the songs seem to be storing up passion for a winter that still promises to eventually break. And it’s that ambivalence of the possibility of beauty and sorrow in every moment between lovers that Falls captures so perfectly. “Last Fall” ultimately leaves us with that expectant uncertainty: “Out in the trees, the winter grew – strange we never new�.We have seen the leaves come circling down: red, gold, and brown, they fell to you. I was falling too.”