Axis Mundi - The Story Brown Bird Never Planned To Tell - A Look Back & Album Review

Brown Bird - James Joiner

Today marks the release of the final Brown Bird album Axis Mundi.  The powerful album carries a full band sound filled with songs grappling with the concept of mortality.  While it would be easy to explain why the album is a quality one, it begs to have explained what preceded the album.  So let's go back a few years through the rise of Brown Bird.

2011 Newport Folk Fest Sunday schedule

Brown Bird, is an amazing band from Providence, RI.  For many, 2011 was the first notice of this "folk-duo" as they ascended to NPR darlings.  It was an incredible year for David Lamb and MorganEve Swain starting with the release of The Sounds of Ghost ep, peaking with a spot on the widely-known Newport Folk Festival, and wrapping up with expansive touring to support their most impressive album Salt for Salt.   2012 meant more touring, along side fellow Newport Folk Fest newcomers The Devil Makes Three.  

2013 was meant to be a great year for the band.  David Lamb had set his banjo aside taking out the electric guitar instead.  Touring would mean favorites would get re-imagined  Even more the year would birth a new album (Fits of Reason) that was released in the spring, and featured new sonic avenues.  Stealing a line from the back of their lyric book The Teeth of Sea & Beasts:  
"The Devil Dancing  and Salt for Salt, were strongly inspired by American Roots and Blues while flavors of Eastern European folk, Klezmer and Romani music existed more subtly in rhythms and string-work.  2013's Fits of Reason saw the addition of electric guitar and bass to the band's established arsenal of cello, violin, upright bass and one-man bass drum, tambourine and wood block foot percussion, as well as displaying a greater presence of Swain's vocals and emphasis n their Middle Eastern, International Psych Rock and Eastern European influences."

Here in Philly, the Brown Bird calendar already started with a bang and stayed strong.  It was New Years Eve with The Devil Makes Three at the Theater of the Living Arts, a spot at Kung Fu Necktie in February, and another great night shared with Joe Fletcher at the Arden Gild Hall, just down the road in Delaware.   

However, some things are not meant to be.  Just barely into touring for Fits of Reason, David Lamb fell ill.  While on the road, he was beyond worn down from the shows and travel and he went to the hospital.  Per the note on the Brown Bird YouCaring.com page:   

"On Friday night, May 10th, Dave was admitted to a hospital in Houston, TX with complaints of fatigue and shortness of breath. After an initial blood test, we were told he was severely anemic, with dangerously low red blood cell levels. Dave had been fighting and been treated for flu-like symptoms for the past six weeks, but until now we were unaware of the seriousness of his condition. Since admittance into the hospital, he has had several blood transfusions, which he is responding to well, and has undergone several tests to determine what is causing his illness. As of yet we still do not have a diagnosis, but are maintaining optimism."

Despite many a fan's outpouring of support, it was a diagnosis that no one wanted to hear. 
A few weeks later the band posted again:
"Over the week, Dave has undergone blood tests and biopsies to narrow down the possible causes for his low blood levels and subsequent illness. There have been several doctors on the case, and they now agree that Dave has a form of leukemia. Brown Bird will be on hiatus while Dave undergoes chemotherapy treatment." 

Essentially all the forward movement the band was making, came to a sudden halt.  No tour, no income, just treatment and staying home.  David Lamb passed less than a year later at age 36 on April 5, 2014.  In the time that David Lamb battled the disease, he and MorganEve were hard at work on new material.  Axis Mundi would become the final release for Brown Bird.  According to MorganEve in a press-release accompanying the new album:
"Axis Mundi is the album that Dave and I wrote during the year of his battle with leukemia. Excluding “Tortured Boy”, which I wrote for him in the first stage of our relationship, these songs were written in the months leading up to his diagnosis, and the months following his bone marrow transplant, when he was confined to our home. As long as he felt well enough to be working, he was. He would spend hours in our home studio, meticulously recording and rerecording his parts - full drums, guitar, vocals, and percussion ideas... This album is different from our others in that it is, in many ways, the album we always wanted to make. It is fuller, louder and more rock-inspired than our previous efforts, while still holding tight to the Middle-Eastern and Eastern European influences we'd become known for. We'd intended to record the record at home during Dave’s recovery, and release and tour on it when he was well enough to get back on the road.

After Dave passed, I poured myself into finishing the record, working with friend and engineer Seth Manchester at Dave’s and my home to record my parts into Dave’s existing demos. My brother, Spencer Swain, acted as producer. Staying true to Dave’s and my original vision for it, Seth, Spencer and I had the record completed just three months later."

Axis Mundi album cover

Axis Mundi is a powerful album.  While the last three albums were quickly paced at 42-43 minutes apiece, this album is a story not rushing to be told.  Length-wise it's just shy of an hour; story-wise it  slowly opens and slowly comes to a close.  "Focus" starts the album with just that; focus.  It's starkness is an immediate reminder that Dave is gone.  "The pain inside / Is yours and mine / We are standing here / Naked and alone / Take me home / I don't belong / An old man dies," these vocals swell over the somber violin and electric guitar.

While their album takes a journey in between, the close of the album features two genuine exchanges between MorganEve and Dave to remind what has been lost, is only in the physical sense.  Likewise, what husband and wife, Dave and MorganEve shared is immortal, if only through song.  The album wraps up in a very explicit way, with the self-evident "Tortured Boy" and "Avalon", a poignant, yet sweet vignette with just Dave accompanied by his acoustic guitar, :

"You're a huntress / And a healer / And a holder of hands / And your heart is the Avalon I seek for my end."

Throughout the middle of Axis Mundi, the other thirteen songs, the unfortunate theme of David's physical battle with Leukemia, his struggle, and reconciliations continue.  The difference in the rest of the album is the continuation of Brown Bird's expanding sound that was started during Fits of Reason.  Electric guitar stays as a featured instrument on the album, but the biggest change is a full drum set, that was notably missing from their previous albums and live shows.  Ragers- "Smoke Rising" and "Sackcloth and Ash" were clearly the next mutation for the band.  "Sackcloth" layered torture over driving drums and cello riffs.

What didn't change was David's uncanny knack for the excellent lyric.  Previously, he brought fantasy to folk, with pitchfork mobs, devils, angels, thunder, shipwrecks, floods, scars, and more.
In the case of Axis,  Dave brought perspective to his battle, not just to what he was going through, but to what MorganEve was also going through.  "Pale and Paralyzed", showcased this madness "Maybe the ground will open / Surely the earth will swallow her whole / One cracking blow to the temple / Doubt takes hold, she's lost control."  Coincidentally, "Bannerman" about a "willful fight forever more" was actually written before Dave's diagnosis according to MorganEve.  Whether these songs were David's true feelings or just songs he was writing we'll never know.     What we do know is Axis Mundi is filled with madness, triumph, decay, agony, battles, and true love.

Axis Mundi by Brown Bird