Great Northern
Trading Twilight for Daylight (Eenie Meenie)
By Melissa Bobbitt
Published: May 17th, 2007 | 4:06pm
“You know that place between asleep and awake? The place where you can still remember dreaming?” That quote from the post-Peter Pan adventure Hook is a spot-on description of Great Northern’s debut record, Trading Twilight for Daylight, an aural Never Never Land and a glistening collection of woozy indie-pop and molasses-tinged boy/girl vocals. Old chums Rachel Stolte (vocals/keyboards) and Solon Bixler (vocals/guitar) weave a tapestry off the same loom that spawned Stars, Spiritualized, and the Submarines. This Los Angeles quartet’s mélange of sullen strings, odes to sunshine, and a lust for lucid dreaming is transcendent and triumphant.
Bouncy and ebullient, “The Middle” sees Stolte and Bixler trading lyrical flirtations as drummer Davey Latter gallops and glides. The languid lullaby “Babies” coos with a wavering want and somber metaphors of doctors and snakes, speckled with chimes and acoustic guitars. It’s an album for introspective walks at dusk – each track bleeds as warmly and brilliantly as stars in the night sky. But like the vast canopy above us, Trading Twilight for Daylight has an element of desolation. “Home,” a track that’s getting attention from terrestrial radio tastemaker Nic Harcourt among others, is a morose but majestic shuffle. “It’s something less than a holiday when you come home,” Stolte sings, as shoe-gazing atmospherics swell behind her.
Great Northern’s musical territory is so breath-taking, one might suspect that the beauty they bring to the speakers is “Just a Dream” (as the radiant ballad of the same name suggests,) but luckily for us, this incredible debut album is a dream come true.
Issue #25
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