If I Don't Come Home You'll Know I'm Gone

IF I DON'T COME HOME YOU'LL KNOW I'M GONE /// Clandestine & Lingering

     

If you can find a house that has a porch that wraps around it, that’s where The Wooden Sky has planted its roots. Under the firmament of some unseen hand, Gavin Gardiner sits on the proverbial rocking chair as storyteller in If I Don’t Come Home You’ll Know I’m Gone. The album swanks fourteen stories of lingering emotions and whispers of faith. And even though this sophomore release is a stroke lighter than its freshman counterpart, there’s no lack of raspy build-ups, haunting harmonies and marching drums. The ‘voice’ of this verbose pastiche can’t sit still and despite the dark possibilities of being carried to the river and left for dead, there’s warmth about it that pleads for an unspoiled summer night complete with fireflies and star-spinning. Maybe it’s because there’s a silver lining to each tale keying in the cliché that ‘everything is going to be alright’ just as in When We Were Young and The Late King Henry. Or maybe it’s because the indie raucous Torontonian troubadours are able to pull-off a genuine Southern (Bit Part) toe-tapping twang. Even if you did strip away the keys, the steel, the strings and the harmonica, the record is an evening breviary to sheets of rain, open roads and clandestine creeks. Not to say that every track has found its place in the stars – the luster of the raconteurs, in due course, fades towards the end of the album… But there’s certainly Something Hiding for Us in the Night and it is somehow falling out of the woodwork of the sky. [(c) 2009 simplymasses dot com]