genres: indie pop + folk
Husband and wife duo The Gray Havens have always played one of the more intriguing blends of folk/indie pop. Debut album Fire and Stone started things off as primarily acoustic folk, not particularly unique but shockingly polished for a debut, and has since slowly developed more and more towards the indie pop end of the spectrum culminating with Blue Flower. Sophomore album Ghost of a King is where the band really began to strike out on their own, weaving an increasingly literary thread through indie folk music that was simultaneously mysterious yet warm. Up next was She Waits, which was not nearly as cohesive or balanced as early releases, but also featured some of the group’s best material to date, highlighted by the inventive post-hip-hop of “High Enough”. After finally slowing down an impressively ambitious release schedule, it was exciting to think what would come after a nearly three year wait. Blue Flower is the biggest overall stylistic shift to date, but maintains many of the standout elements of past albums while also elevating everything to perhaps an even higher level of overall quality.
Without a doubt, this is the most impressive songwriting for the duo to date, which was already a strikingly high bar. It’s still not quite as stylistically consistent as the first two albums (more on that later), but whether playing upbeat indie pop or meditative ambient ballads, each song is incredibly tight. The band’s flair for literary touches in their lyrics is stronger than ever, here frequently borrowing allusions from C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia (“Endless Summer” and “Tread the Dawn” being the most obvious), but taking them in a more complex philosophical direction than simply using them as narrative devices. Early on in the album’s run, sunny indie pop reigns over most songs, from the incredibly bouncy “Rhythm of the East” to more pensive (yet still optimistic) tracks like “Endless Summer”, which evokes a slightly more restrained version of Five Score and Seven Years Ago era Relient K. These songs are fantastic, but I can’t help being a little sad that the more mysterious and ethereal notions from earlier seem to be gone. Just when I started to accept that this would be a more straightforward release in its entirety, the back half of the album kicks in, including standouts “Pale Moonlight” and “Anyone”, which musically call back to Ghost of a King, but with even a little more darkness.
By the end, it’s clear that The Gray Havens have truly surpassed even the highest expectations of what they can do with songwriting across a host of genres, but as a singular experience I’m not sure it quite reaches the heights of earlier albums. The pacing and sequencing of the tracks is genuinely bizarre, almost alternating poppy and meditative songs instead of settling into a groove or creating any larger tonal narratives. This is an extremely minor critique in light of everything that this album delivers on, but it’s odd to see such macro factors overlooked when the attention to detail within individual tracks is so high. Overall, this is a phenomenal collection of songs with hardly a single weak track, but feel free to throw it in playlists or on shuffle instead of listening straight through.
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