Growing at the Edges - The Demos (Demo)

Album review

Not counting a song-by-song cover of Vashti Bunyan's Just Another Diamond Day in 2019, Jordan Lee's fourth Mutual Benefit album, Growing at the Edges, finds the project opening up its sound and collaborative spirit even more than on its predecessors. To begin with, it's the first one to welcome the involvement of a co-producer, Gabriel Birnbaum (Wilder Maker), who is also one of a dozen guest musicians to perform on the record. Along with several other prior collaborators (Birnbaum played saxophone on 2018's Thunder Follows the Light), that group includes string arranger Concetta Abbate, guitarist Jonnie Baker (Florist), upright bassist Nick Jost (Wilder Maker, Baroness), drummer/percussionist Sean Mullins (Wilder Maker, Andy Shauf), and LP, who's credited with additional singing. Despite the relatively long list of players, the album retains Mutual Benefit's recognizably gentle, pastoral character on a set of songs and connecting instrumentals that subtly incorporate touches of jazz and country into its exquisite chamber folk.
The title track starts things off bittersweetly with instruments like piano, violin, slide guitar, glockenspiel, and other mallet percussion on a leisurely tempoed, reflective song that looks to dare dream again. Some of its metaphorical imagery includes "Peeking from a seed/Where there was a wasteland/Something new" on an album abundant in poetic references to nature and regrowth. The lead track's poignancy rarely abates as the album moves through instrumental interludes with titles like "Remembering a Dream" and "Winter Sun, Cloudless Sky," with its toy-like keyboard tones, and songs with unfixed structures like "Beginner's Heart," which progresses from something intimate and folky to something that climaxes with crashing cymbals; the skittering "Untying a Knot"; and the twangier "Little Ways," which notices the passage of time through all the "little ways the landscape changes/And I know it does the same in me." Lee continues this train of thought on the closer, "Signal to Bloom," whose arrangement of flute, shimmery keys, field recordings of birds, and rubato phrasing eventually picks up a rhythm section and melody, only to abate wordlessly into a clutter of harmonically guided improvisation with an emotional tenor akin to Guaraldi's "Christmas Time Is Here." An artful pop album with a compositional thread running through, Growing at the Edges is Mutual Benefit's most ambitious -- and, arguably, touching -- outing yet.

© Marcy Donelson /TiVo