Trilobite – Self-Titled

The back story for this enchanting debut is all about words, about how singer and principal songwriter Mark Ray Lewis was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and how he won an O. Henry and a Pushcart for his fiction. The images in his songs, from kingfishers and caves to ploughshares and holy ghosts, are plenty evocative, and loaded with spiritual and existential freight. Yet ultimately its the music that lingers a parched, creaky take on rustic verities done up in pump organ, pedal steel, tuba, cello, banjo, and piano. Its a burbling, oompahing wheeze that seems to be groaning, even the gauzy he-she harmonies, with the rest of creation. Pregnant, too, are lines such as Floss my soul Esparanza and We are math/We are math/We are a length of cold water, words that portend volumes but beguile as music.