Feathers – S/T

I’ve taken some time over the last few years to look back at records nearing anniversaries. It’s something I don’t often indulge in, but where there are obvious albums that will get piled upon by adoring press looking to put their thumb on the scale of a classic, there are also several albums that feel left behind by banner year celebrations. To me, this is one of the pivotal albums of the early aughts psych-folk bloom. As eyes and ears were drawn around Devendra and his roster of Golden Apples, Vermont was quietly building one of the best collectives of the decade. The band would be quickly brought into that fold, contributing music to Cripple Crow and getting a release via Devendra and Andy Cabic’s Gnomonsong. While the self-released LP came out in 2005, the CD on Gnomonsong the following year brought it to many more eyes and ears, giving this year a soft 20th Anniversary of the record. Feathers features many members of bands who found their notoriety both in and out of the free folk blossom. The most notable among the ranks here is likely Kyle Thomas, then a name that might not have struck many chords, but soon to be snagging attention with Witch, alongside J Mascis, and on the debut as King Tuff, also a 2006 release.

The band features Kyle’s Happy Birthday bandmate Ruth Garbus alongside several Brattleboro scene players like Kurt Weisman, Meara O’Reilly (also of Grass), Thomas’ Witch bandmate Asa Irons, and a few others that would round out the sprawling, psychedelic fold. The album had humble beginnings, recorded over long stretches in Thomas’ room to a 4-track they’d bought off of a reggae band. A leaderless collective that embraces the idyll of free folk, the band’s songs swerve from nocturnal flickers scarred by secrets, like the dark centerpiece “Ibex Horn,” to the bucolic sunshine folk of closer “Come Around.” The record, like so many of the best from this period, feeds into a feeling of quietude; a hidden hollow of sound that lets the listener inside to inhabit it for a little while.

The band’s wider influence would open up after the CD release of the eponymous album. The collective went on to open for Smog, Sufjan, and Espers, broadening their reach from the New England loop they’d been traveling for the preceding year. The record remains the most complete document of the band, though they have an excellent curio of CD-rs that came out as tour pieces around the time. A live disc from 2004 works through material from the debut before they were etched tape, but more studio cuts on the Tour Paint CD keep the candlelit laments begun here alive. Notably, there’s also the makings of a second album though it remains almost entirely unreleased. Something’s Wrong With Feathers was cut in a scant run on handmade CD-rs before the band called it quits, driven in a dozen directions by their various outlets. It’s a hint at where the band would have headed, had they not disappeared into the ether. The psych-folk revival brought many bright spots, and Feathers burned brighter than most, and more briefly than the bulk. It’s a shame there wasn’t more, but that just makes this release all the more precious for its existence.