line-up

Since 2008, Austin, Texas, instrumental ensemble Balmorhea—pronounced “Bal-more-ay,” and named for a tiny town and big lake between the Mexico and New Mexico borders—has made an album about rivers, an album about the American frontier, and an album about outer space. Still, the natural metaphor that seems most applicable for the alternately lilting and brooding band is that of the ocean’s shores—water comes in and rises; water goes out and exposing a slightly different landscape than the one you knew.

Indeed, on both a self-titled, self-released debut LP and the extraordinary follow-up Rivers Arms, Balmorhea was mostly multi-instrumentalists Michael Muller and Rob Lowe. With serpentine acoustic guitar lines and stately, steadily rising tunes for piano and electric guitar, they cast a wide-screen drama with the help of field recordings and special guests. By last year’s All is Wild, All is Silent, however, Muller and Lowe had collected more players, including full-time strings and drums, building a steady six-piece that steeled those slow-burning compositions with the compulsion to climax always. It was a bit too much, really, the lack of restraint making All is Wild feel a tad maudlin and more than a touch overblown.

But some water receded, or, more specifically, Balmorhea found a way to make all of its new players make sense on this year’s glorious Constellations, the band’s most reflective and enduring album to date. The resplendent “Bowsprit” employs silence as well as it uses sound, while “Steerage and the Lamp” tucks and curls behind stacks and smears of melodies. “On the Weight of Night” reaches an asymptotic roar, rising until the only options left are rupture or silence. Smartly, Balmorhea—better tempered now, steadier and with more grace—chooses the latter. They drift into closer  “Palestrina,” a gorgeous choice that brings the computer-based facets of Rivers Arms full circle—that is, music once made with machines returns to human hands. The tide comes in. —Grayson Currin