Lost in the Trees

All Alone in an Empty House (Anti-)

By Amanda Stovall
Published: August 13th, 2010 | 1:00pm

Lost in the Trees is a collaborative effort out of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with enough band members and contributors to make a writer feel lost in the amount of names to include in a credits list. Despite the potential for contributor overload, frontman Ari Picker has helped create an album that listeners will want to get lost in. I first played the band’s third studio album while driving down a lonely Texas highway. The roadside cactus here thrives in the hot summer sun and the first few bars of guitar notes that floated out of the car speakers cast a calm into the air that encompassed both myself and the empty road.

The title track has the distinct undertones of the guitar strumming you’d hear plucked from old cowboys sitting on a wooden front porch, and is overlaid with Picker’s soulful folk vocals. The lyrics he sings, “Are we ever leaving? / We’ve got black spots in our eyes / No I never meant to hurt anyone / No one is perfect,” are just vague enough to feel applicable to anyone, and just heartbreaking enough to make the threads of a body feel as though they are being slowly loosened. “Walk Around the Lake” comes flooding in with ghostly, forceful orchestration, contradicting the unsettling melody with the words “sometimes all it takes is a walk around the lake to ease your mind.”

Tracks like “Fireplace” take on the impassioned, throaty screams that singers such as Glen Hansard are famous for, while others could double as lullabies, like “Song for the Painter,” with smooth violins and the poetic recitation of, “for all those with broken hearts, I know what you’re going through / I had a true love once but now they’ve gone and left me blue / So now I’d like to swim to the bottom of the ocean and there I’ll scream as loud as I can where there’s no one I can frighten.” Guitars strummed vigorously with howling vocals would make Neutral Milk Hotel proud, and the track “A Room Where Your Paintings Hang” fights for the same power that Jeff Mangum achieved with his songwriting and succeeds. The theme of art and creation is woven throughout the album, with the album’s own art peaking in the instrumental songs that bookend folk rock with orchestration, threatening to set a listener on fire with graceful and forcefully played violin strings.

While “Wooden Walls of this Forest Church” says that “you don’t have to get it right the first time,” Lost in the Trees did with this album. The music ended long before my drive, and my finger was on repeat before the last note could fade out.

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Lost in the Trees official Web site

Lost in the Trees MySpace page

Anti- Records