The National Lights treads much the same territory as Dolorean, Iron and Wine and Be Good Tanyas on their debut album, The Dead Will Walk, Dear. Singer-songwriter Jacob Thomas Berns has assembled a double handful of deceptively gentle gothic tales of sorrow, love, regret and loss. He's abetted by multi-instrumentalist Ernest Christian Kiehne and harmony singer Sonya Cotton.
The songs, as I said, are deceptively gentle, but as you listen or follow along with the lyrics in the booklet, you slowly realize that there's some very dark stuff going on. Add Handsome Family to the list of similarities.
On the opening track, "Better For it, Kid," for instance, the narrator sings, "let me cover you up / in my button flannel shirt ..." and helps her sit up in bed and folds her arms, and you only slowly realize that he's addressing his dead lover. This is sung in Bern's multi-tracked soft voice, accompanied by plucked acoustic guitar and gentle chords from piano and organ. The second song "Mess Around" is even more chilling. Accompanied by two warm fingerpicked guitars, the narrator addresses the kid sister of one of his friends, crooning, "You'll make me smile / just you wait and see / your body will be found / before your hair can grow," and ends with a request to "Turn your head around." Yikes!
The title song, a lilting waltz, may be sung by Death himself. "Then, when your legs were still young / you begged me to have you," he sings. "Now I'm going to keep you." Cotton's prominent harmonies on the second and final verse, and the plucked banjo in the outro, as well as the subject matter, give this one an Appalachian feel.
And so it goes for all 10 songs. They're all equally lovely and all equally disturbing. The body count gets tiresome after a while. Would it hurt Mr. Berns to give us even one tale with a different ending? The girl ends up buried in the riverbed in "Riverbed," in the backyard in "Ohio," is drowned in a desert river in "The Water is Wide," in a swamp in "Swimming in the Swamp," in a lake in "Killing Swallows." At least the music sometimes gets more upbeat, with a tambourine for rhythm and a sweet synthesizer in "Buried Treasure." It's actually even somewhat jaunty, as Berns and Cotton sing about digging a hole out in the yard "big enough for you to fit inside." So is "The Water is Wide," for that matter; jaunty and upbeat musically, that is.
This is pretty, and pretty creepy, music. Keep an eye on The National Lights. They've got potential, if this debut is any indication. Just don't turn your back on 'em, and don't go near the water.
