Paper Sparrow is a lo-fi atmospheric dream folk artist. His 7-track album “Bluebird”, is available on his website www.papersparrow.us. The album was recorded earlier this year on a four-track tape recorder. It’s not often that you find albums without any waste, but Paper Sparrow’s album, “Bluebird” defies ordinary music. Each track here counts, both lyrically and musically.
Paper Sparrow invariably layers in quirky sounds, but the textures behind the music are stunningly atmospheric, never too distracting. The lack of percussion, offers further hypnotic obsessiveness to the flow of the music. The elliptically raw lyrics, however, are what make the songs on “Bluebird” burrow into your consciousness. The story behind the songs is not always clear. Nonetheless, you invariably get the feeling that, somehow, every word of every song was transcribed out of one of your own dreams.
Paper Sparrow clearly has something in common with the folk music of the early sixties. In addition to the attitude and honesty of the lyrics, the emphasis here is on experimentation and using familiar elements to create an undeniably vital and new art form that has been steadily growing over the years.
At first, one might be taken aback by the crudeness of the technology used – recording on a four-track tape recorder in 2015 is pretty unusual. But after a few listens, you realize that the choice was perfect, and you can’t imagine the songs being constructed any other way. As is often the case with true lo-fi music, it’s easy to listen to, but by no means easy listening. This is music that goes a lot deeper than the apparent minimal sound it develops.
Paper Sparrow does not allow you simple melodies and catchy rhythms, so you can just join the dots and enjoy, as you do with your Top 40 hits. The experimentation on this album is solemn and earnest, carving out songs that have aural depth and texture. Paper Sparrow slowly builds each verse and chorus into haunting, beautiful and dark musical passages. The gentle and almost vulnerable vocals perfectly suit the acoustic settings. Sure, it isn’t radio friendly, but then we all know that is no measure of goodness – in any way at all!
As opposed to mainstream Pop’s throwaway ‘impulsive’ manner, Paper Sparrow is more concerned with making ‘compulsive’ music. And it is best achieved on songs like “Little Ghost”, “Erased From The Map”, “The Infinite Key” and “Perpetual Motion Machine”. But this is not an album where you pick out hit tracks. As far as I’m concerned this is a quality album as a whole, rather than just a random collection of songs – very surreal, very chilled out, and very good at setting a defined mood that has already been predetermined by the songwriter. A clear sign that the music has achieved its goal!
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