REVIEW: Virgin of the Birds - Winter Seeds

In a few weeks Jon Rooney has gone from "who's Jon Rooney" to a guy a check in with daily.  Well, to be honest, I really don't have any daily contact with Jon, despite both of us living in the Seattle area.  But I have been wearing out the little digital coding of Winter Seeds, Jon's first LP in the guise of Virgin of the Birds.  Winter Seeds consists of nine nuggets of well-crafted guitar pop centered on interesting reflections and observations, and conveyed with shimmering guitar, burly electric bass and Jon's intimate, folky vocal delivery.  It all goes down so well that I had to rewind a bit to think about why this album felt so special.  For me, despite the obviously adept musicianship and professional, sincere delivery, is the songwriting.  With many things in life, there are dozens of ways to phrase it, but a master songwriter knows how to turn the phrase and construct the rhyme for maximum evocative payload.  If you are looking for such a guy, my recommendation is Jon Rooney (he can even put that on his resume).  The first single from the album is track three, "Every Revelry", and I think it is a fitting introduction to the craft of Virgin of the Birds.

Make your enemies, make them fast
Grow your poisonous trees to last
Spread your doom about the room
Give your dirge a place to bloom

All your venomous, vicious prayers
Won’t bring reckoning anywhere
Not at the abbey, not with the wives
Not at the fugue state of our lives

And in time we both will come to feel ashamed
Of every revelry we felt compelled to claim

When we were young, we couldn’t wait
To take our turn and savage our fate
I brace myself whenever we seem
To share our shade and drink the same dream

I am gentle because I’m strong
And you are wicked because you’re wrong
Wrong about beauty, wrong about hell
Wrong about the girls who make me well

And in time we both will come to feel ashamed
Of every revelry we felt compelled to claim

And the video --


Virgin of the Birds began in 2009 with a series of download-only EPs, through which the band drew the attention of Edinburgh, Scotland, label Song by Toad.  Originally a solo effort, Jon's Winter Seeds project expanded to include Colin J. Nelson and Marc Laurick.  The album contains four new tracks and reworked versions of five tracks from previous EPs.  Compared to the EPs, I think the album reveals Jon's growth as a songwriter and confidence as Virgin of the Birds.  The songs range from energetic to low-tempo.  While I think the band shows better on the former, there is joy to be found in the slower numbers.  Only one song, "The Serpent Plume", took some time to grow on me, but it is followed by the absolutely wonderful "Drunk on Grudges".

This is a prior version of the album opener, "They Wake".  I think the album version is a more robust.

You may seek the wind among the reeds
You may give the girls the love they need
The love they need is gold, the love is never doomed
The love they want is gilded with a lavish gloom

They wake, they marry and they cry
They wake to hear stories when they die
Stories told with joy, stories often true
Stories when their cleverness was calling you

Pay no heed to the tenor of the times
I will destroy the wisdom of the wise

They say that the lights were left on until dawn

They wake beneath the slanting sun
They wake without telling anyone
About the winter seeds, the songs too hard to sing
The pleasures wide awake in nearly everything

Pay no heed to the tenor of the times
I will destroy the wisdom of the wise

They say that the lights were left on until dawn

Winter Seeds is released on Jon's Abandoned Love Records in the US, and Song by Toad in the UK, and is available in vinyl and digital formats.

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Abandoned Love Records
Song By Toad Records