Mount Rainier, looking less snowy than usual.
Feathers belong to the age of CDRs with hand-drawn cover art, YouSendIt links on message boards, and record labels that existed almost notionally, as single-page, barely navigable websites with a static catalog and a mail order address. Feathers as a band were a maybe-grudging participant in the freak folk era, or they were at least lumped into that scene thanks to close proximity to Devendra Banhart, whose Gnomonsong label released their self-titled LP.
I saw the band play live, once, in Philadelphia in 2005, a lifetime ago. They played with Smog, incredibly, and I remember it being a good show. I actually wrote about it at the time, on the way-old version of this site:
Based on a recommendation from Orbis Quintus* a little while back, I went into Philly to see Feathers play on Saturday night. They did not disappoint. 7 people on stage (there are 8 in the band, apparently, not sure where the other member was), swapping instruments on every song, 5 of them harmonizing together at different points, songs a mish-mash of late night outdoor hymns, Espers-ish lace-lined ballads, deep and entrenched Southern rock, noise and metal flourishes just for the fun of it, hot sitar riffs (!), and all of it gorgeous and very moving. The song they played at the end of their set just killed- it was ten minutes long, started off as a tender acoustic number and ended with ecstatic waves of noise washing down over the crowd.
[*NB: I wish I remembered this blog, but I don’t, since it was so long ago.]
I think explaining how enjoyable it was to hunt down these bands and their releases through cryptic websites and buried links and weird email listservs is a little ridiculous, but it’s true: it was really fun. There are a lot of reasons why this was the case, but at least part of it was because the internet was still a little wild then, with social media basically in its infancy, and people still used and enjoyed websites and email and blogs. It felt like you could discover a great band by pure accident every week, just by looking around a little. You find out someone in a band you like plays in this other band, or they appeared on a weird compilation CD curated by Hisham Bharoocha from Black Dice, and that leads you to Benji Cossa or White Magic, etc. Or someone writes beautifully about a song and you listen to it and then feel compelled to track down everything else by that artist. It (here I’m referring both to the internet and the act of finding music to listen to) all felt a lot more personal and substantial, way less shitty and enervating
"Feathers" (the song) is from the CDR, "Something's Wrong with Feathers," and is a good example of the band's charm. It's a tiny song but well arranged, expanding after the first minute to include pretty Disney harmonies and some elegant guitar work. Probably my favorite song of theirs and the one that best shows what they were capable of. "Hearing little songs/little bird songs/hearing little worlds/little worlds." It's a two minute pick-me-up.
“Howndawg,” also from “Something’s Wrong with Feathers,” shows another side of the band, tilting a little into Southern rock territory (very lightly). It sounds a little like if you imagined the Band rehearsing some old country standard but not taking it very seriously and just kind of fucking around—it’s fun. The band is audibly laughing throughout the track, but it’s also pretty great: good fiddle, weird vocals, funky guitar noodling, and gang vocals at the end from what sounds like a kennel full of dogs.
[“Something’s Wrong with Feathers” sometimes appears on Discogs]
“Old Black Hat with Dandelion Flower” is close to what I remember the band sounding like at the Philly show in 2005. The track is thick with instruments and vocals, beautiful harmonies, guitar lines in the margins, lots of interesting and unexpected percussion. One of their better melodies, like with “Feathers,” it feels somehow very natural and easy. This is from their self-titled LP.
“Past the Moon,” also from their LP, wanders, climbs, skitters. A cousin to “Feathers,” this is also mostly acoustic guitar and voice at first. Feels like a delicate, barely-song kind of song. A handful of notes, scattered on the ground, and someone whispers a benediction: those are the building blocks of “Past the Moon.” But then it opens up a little, a whistle enters, another presence, and eventually, more voices. Off-putting and elusive at first, then gorgeous and welcoming by the end.