Hudson Bell, When the Sun Is the Moon

reviewed by dave heaton

For When the Sun Is the Moon, Hudson Bell has taken smart, Southern-flavored pop-rock songs – much like those on his fine 2002 album Captain of the Old Girls - and wrapped them in a storm cloud of electric guitars, expanding their stature and making them even more involving. You'll know it's coming right from the start, as Bell's guitar playing slowly works its way into a sweeping, Neil Young-style hurricane. "Slow Burn" slowly stomps forward confidently, like Bell's found his Crazy Horse, though all the guitar-playing's his own and he's joined by just two other musicians. "Into the heart you burn," Bell sings, evoking the apocalypse and the uncertainty of a new love as his guitar sears the air.

That 8-minute opening whirlwind makes a strong first impression, but the more compact, catchy rock number that follows it, "Atlantis Nights," is just as strong, tough on the surface and sensitive underneath. And while the tone of the album ebbs and flows in terms of energy and pace, each song hits harder than the one before it, on first listen even.

Bell has a way with stirring up emotions without being sentimental about it. There's a melancholy air to the album, a feeling that we're all floating through life without a clue where we're headed ("driving through the mountains / listening to a song"). Yet that's rarely explicitly spelled out in the lyrics, which alternate between being abstract and physical/anecdotal, placing you vividly in a specific place without over-explaining the why.

The electric, expansive approach he and his bandmates take to most of these songs intensifies the emotional power. "The Falls" stirs with a restless but contemplative feeling while channeling the album's aura of a wide-open landscape into a tale of a solitary car drive across country, watching as "the sun becomes the moon." The gentler "The Midnight Year" has a similar introspective mood about it, while Bell's melody wanders its way through an astute consideration of place, of what's involved in movement, physical and emotional.

"Strange Lands" echoes Pavement's "Elevate Me Later" in its opening moments, appropriate for the way thoughts of that band resonate with the way the lyrics' portrait of life spent drifting. After When the Sun Is the Moon ends I'm left with lingering images of planets and galaxies, of never-ending landscapes spread out in front of you. The music evokes these impressions just as the lyrics do, making us feel like we're floating through space and time, our heads spinning from the cloud of dust around us, one built from sounds coaxed from, and pounded out of, an electric guitar. It feels like life, then, in all its aimlessness and curiosity.

{www.monitorrecords.com}