Lowing is a finely rendered, highly focused album that captures Dil Brito at their best.
Vancouver band Dil Brito’s 2018 album Mote was an album’s worth of musical inquiry, full of their self-declared “experimental alt-folk” and sonic studies on just how far they could push form. Where Mote unspooled like a spontaneous stream of consciousness, their latest, Lowing, hums with a quiet intensity; it is a finely rendered, highly focused album that still manages to capture Dil Brito at their free-form improvisational best.
Opener “The Bodies” sets the tone and mood for the rest of Lowing. It’s the sound of treading water in a sea of swirling social media influences and rapid-fire change. Even while its dissonant strings pick up the tempo, “The Bodies” heartbeat remains measured and calm. Even with haunted, muted crashes of piano chords, “Maybe Move” feels as soothing as a lullaby. Thematically Lowing hinges on the idea that as the world gets increasingly loud and chaotic, the more we need to master the art of standing still. “Bait the silence, make opaque all the noise we want to marry with waste,” goes the words to “Splintering, “I’ve been thinking about fate, for the gaps when I can sit and wait.” As a reward to patient and attentive listeners, songs like “The Pearl” and “I Am Being Clear For Once” offer sonic nuggets of fun; the former has passages that sound like the band keep turning the volume knob up and down to hypnotic effect; the latter is a jaunty guitar-plucked tune underpinned with what sounds like an interstellar message from an alien lifeform.
As if to further reinforce the notion of sitting still and centring oneself amidst a sea of change, Dil Brito is introducing Lowing through a unique listening party: the album will play in its entirety over the in-house sound systems of a number of Vancouver businesses simultaneously. More than a dozen locations will have Lowing subtly, quietly playing so that, in their words, “Only those who want to listen can listen — for everyone else, [Dil Brito] haven’t added to the noise of their lives.”
