Phil Cook, member of the folk collective Megafaun has released his seventh solo album, Appalachia Borealis. On this record, Cook abandons his traditional instruments (the guitar and banjo) for gospel-tinged solo piano meditations. The album, so named for Cook’s southern-gospel influences sees Cook playing piano alongside recorded birdsongs. Recorded within his own home, with birds singing directly outside, Cook describes the album as “a meditative spiritual practice for me… I want it [the album] to feel really close to you because it is very personal to me,”.
The album itself moves through a variety of differing sounds and moods; firstly, the opening track “Rise” is the most gospel influenced of the bunch and sees Cook taking his time and playing blues-infused and gospel-singed melodies alongside his own accompaniment. “Rise” is an immediate standout and an extremely strong opening track for the album. It is, as a good opener should be, emblematic of the record’s ethos; there is no filler in the track, but there is no shortage of space either. The track feels, as Cook puts it, spiritual. Another example of this ethos of meditation can be found with Cook’s treatment of the dual tracks “Running”/”Wescott” wherein Cook takes the same melodic line and reinterprets it through the two tracks; on the former as a mid-tempo call and response oriented piece in which Cook reacts to his own melodic lines in a myriad of interesting ways, and in the latter (Wescott) where he reinterprets the track as a slow, melancholy ballad with a bluesy bite.
By the time in the record where “Thrush Song” appears, it is clear Cook is playing to someone or something; he is consistently reactive and respectful of another we cannot hear. Without reading the liner notes, it would be easy to think until “Thrush Song” that Cook is simply reacting to himself; however, the short track incorporates recorded birdsong as a reaction to Cook’s slow, pleading melody. It is here in the record where one begins to hear the birdsongs Cook has been reacting to all along, and this serves as a fascinating midway point in the album in which the record shifts from a lonely, melancholy album to one of hope and prayer along with nature itself.
The following track, “I Made A Lovers Prayer” (a cover of a Gillian Welch song) is the longest on the album, and the penultimate example of Cook’s fantastic ballad playing. “Buffalo”, another standout is the rare up-tempo track on the album, and it introduces a brief period of anxious energy to the final ten minutes of the album.
The final track, “Appalachia Borealis” is the height of Cook’s ballad playing and the best track on the album by a wide margin. Slow, plaintive, and utterly gorgeous, the slow melody glides over slow and lush chords in Cook’s left hand. On this title track, Cook embraces his own album’s sound and manner, and over a few movements of the track develops themes respective of the many sections of the album as a whole. “Appalachia Borealis” serves as a microcosm of Cook’s own album, the sound of the record in miniature.
As a holistic piece, Appalachia Borealis embraces a singular sound. The record is the sound of meditation, of acceptance, and of peace. As the liner notes say, “On Appalachia Borealis, Cook peers into the dark, sees a way forward, and sets it all to exquisite sound.” The record is structurally very sound and is set in such a way that the meditations on piano never become dragging or overly staged against each other; Cook knows when to break the flow between tracks with a style shift or a change in tempo. This changes rarely feel overly abrupt, though it can sometimes be difficult to emerge from one of Cook’s slower pieces into a faster one (for example, the transition between “Dawn Birds” and “Buffalo” is a tad sudden). As a whole, however, the album does exactky what it set out to do: deliver eleven meditative, spiritual, and emotional tracks in order to take the listener on a journey.
