Between Space & Time
EBY debuted Between Space and Time (B/TST) on February 29, 2020, just two weeks before the pandemic shutdowns. As an anthology, B/TST includes some of their earliest works interspersed with the ‘vital vibrations’ of what’s to come, thematically centered on the relationships between people as they bump and collide through the Large Hadron Collider of Life. Their songwriting shines through with earnest lyrics and a powerful delivery through their unique harmonies. Ranging from the weird country of “Brand New Day” and traces of gypsy jazz in “Actions” to the sonically dark musings on mortality in “Epitaph” and the grooving portrait of cosmic love on “Your Light”, the songs of Between Space and Time shine like the stars of a newly, emerging constellation. At the core of the album, the band hits their stride with laid-back rocker “Schtick Shift”, the spacious, Grateful Dead-esque “Bluster”, and the boot-stomping storm of “Thunder Train.”
Mourning Sounds
If B/TST’s effort represented a collection of songs, then Mourning Sounds is a complete thought, according to Johnny, a classic-rock fan of Pink Floyd’s The Wall and The Beatles’ Revolver, with the title an homage to Brian Wilson’s iconic Pet Sounds and Smile albums. The “Perfect” Suite, which closes the new record with a three-song medley, evokes the band’s old-timey parlor style guitar-picking with the lush changes of “Heroes & Villains” alongside some brass riffing right out of Van Morrison.
Johnny explains Mourning Sounds “is about loss and grieving... It can be personal, but also about all the things we’ve lost along the way this past year. We had no choice during lockdown but to look at where we’ve been and where we’re going. The album title started as Morning Sounds, but quickly evolved as the pandemic raged on. We’re not just mourning loved ones we’ve lost, but the society we used to have.”
He describes the 11 songs as “a narrative exploring the emotional states of being created by trauma, and specifically grief illustrated through oceanic metaphors.”
Recorded with engineer and Bay Area transplant Robert Shimp at his Technical Earth Recorders, located just a block from John and Beth’s home in downtown Montgomery, AL – which Veres has helped revitalize with his interest in urban planning – Mourning Sounds features cameos from Karita Law, with a yowling take on the Stones-y rocker “Lost at Sea” (under her stage name Rhetta Simone, she has been a back-up singer for Brittany Howard, Prince, Robert Glasper and Jon Batiste).
Mourning Sounds form a shimmering meditation on dreams and mortality, a baroque chamber rock narrative in which water forms a leitmotif, both destructive and life-affirming – specifically its bottomless depths and the ability to keep one’s head above it – which can be heard in the “Gimme Shelter” plaint of “Lost at Sea,” the “Surf’s Up” harmonies of “Escaping the Foam” and the transcendent wordless chant of the climactic, and cathartic, “Rising Tides.” Songs like the pastoral “Lonely Child” eye close friends suffering from mental health issues, while “A Thousand Years of Silence” is about “Sitting on the bottom of the ocean/Staring out into the blue/I can still hear the last thing you said to me/Echoing through the open sea.”
On another level, Mourning Sounds offers an intimate conversation between Johnny and Beth, who christened the band’s original Blue Yonder name from sharing relatives who were in the U.S. Air Force, then added the Electric after getting married two years ago. By the end of the album, it’s like waking up to a brand-new day.
“Step by step mile by mile and day by day/You can plan for tomorrow but you gotta live for today.” “Rising Tides”