On his first solo EP, Silent Hour/Golden Mile, Daniel Rossen truly exemplifies his capability to arrange tempestuous, wide-ranging music. The grandiosity of this little 5-track record comes at the perfect time for the folk-jazz-everything-rock crooner. His band Grizzly Bear is in Cape Cod brewing up a new album after the release of one of 2009’s best releases, Vekatimest. After such a successful year, Rossen was suffering that post-road syndrome that we’ve seen before, to the point where he was questioning his motives to make any new music at all. Isolating himself and making every effort to push past the despondent voices holding him back from creation, Rossen has created an introspective whirlwind of airs and it’s pretty easy to get caught up in the cyclonic landscape of styles on the record as well.
The leading track, “Up On High” comes in with the familiar acoustic sound we’ve come to know from Rossen, fused with a groovy Beatles-esque bass-line and palliative string instruments. Rossen opens his sprawling vocals, emphasizing the isolation, “In this big empty room / Finally feel free / To sing for me.” It’s a simple line, but potent enough to capture images of great space and contemplation. Rossen’s lyrics have never been very opaque, these are all ideas easy to step into, but reflective all the same. The song works as one big metaphor, Rossen is setting out into a storm of existential resolutions: “If the tides should all turn / Push me off to sea / Swim for me.”
“Return To Form” is the most complex song on the EP, and one of the greatest I’ve ever heard from Rossen. Smack in the middle, it’s energetic acoustic pluckings get you wishing you were kicking around rocks and hiking the Grand Canyon on a starry night. Rossen nails it, “It's time again for your return / Now find the peace you deserve / The stars hang in a shroud.” The mood is heavy-handed, but necessarily so. It’s not hard to see Rossen thinking up these songs on long, contemplative walks at twilight. Then 20 seconds past the 3-minute mark we’re suddenly experiencing a marvelous topography of overdriven guitar and drum fills. George Harrison comes to mind.
With the climax of “Return to Form” comes a song that returns to the most elemental form of song-writting, the piano, where Rossen brings us down and laments of a Saint that has no name or place. On "Saint Nothing" we are again being taken to a familiar place of remoteness. The vocals are stirring, fantastically layered at the end as Rossen sings “How Long?” over and over. “Golden Mile” brings it home with bright mandolin. There is a heavenly quality to this song; the vocals are comforting, there is a willingness to prevail, to win the fight for the imagination. Rossen wails, “There is bliss in this mess / There is magnus all around.” Rossen has done something very noteworthy with this song. He has added a redemptive tint to an already colorful, and wide-ranging little collection of songs. There is despair in Silent Hour/Golden Mile, but in the end an epiphanic truth that rings out in a most uplifting way, and this is a most impressive feat to be done in just five songs.
Grade: A-
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