Album review
The massive dark land is no fantastical place. The title of Naima Bock‘s new album is taken from a passage in Olga Tokarczuk’s book Flights, in which a man briefly wakes from his uneasy sleep on an airplane and looks out the window. “Only here and there do weak groups of lights make their way out of that darkness – those are big cities,” he observes. For Bock, who spent her childhood between Brazil, Greece, and London, as well as any of us who have sat through the isolating (and oddly communal) experience of a long-haul flight, the description is surely resonant. But the narrator goes on to trace a line between that man and another one right down below, “just walking out of his wooden home and raising his eyes to the sky, checking the weather for tomorrow,” calling them “vertical neighbours.” Listening to Below a Massive Dark Land, the follow-up to Bock’s brilliant 2022 debut Giant Palm, you get the sense that the singer-songwriter aspires to a similar vastness of perspective, the capacity to imagine new forms of human connection even in a moment of mundane yet profound solitude.
At the risk of stretching the metaphor too far, great songwriting is all about capturing those flickers of light that most people would handily ignore. It’s not hard to envision a version of Below a Massive Dark Land that is wholly somber and dim, but Bock seems to have taken considerable lengths – and enlisted the right collaborators – to dig it out of that place. “See how I break seven times more than you/ For every heart that I ripped out/ I’m in pain, I’m paying my dues,” she sings on ‘Feed My Release’, the ache softened by Meitar Wegman’s gorgeous saxophone, echoed by backing vocals from co-producer Oliver Hamilton (of caroline) and Holly Whitaker, and steadied by the rhythm section of bassist Clem Appleby and drummer Cassidy Hansen, who play on for a solid half-minute longer than anyone instead of fading the song out. “My sweet body crumbles so endlessly/ My sweet body crumbles so carefully,” she sings, picking each adverb as if it has the power to shift the entire meaning of the song, and it does.
‘My Sweet Body’ finds Bock in the pit of that darkness (“Lie down still and let soil take back/ All that it can”), even if her language still has a taste for the cosmic (“I will eat till I touch the stars”). But Bock’s simple knack for melody, coupled with the richness of the arrangements, give depth and color to even the starkest devastation. Working with Bristol duo Jack Ogborne (aka Bingo Fury) and Joe Jones, Bock is able to not only harness the delicate and fragile nature of various string and plucked instruments but differentiate between them, some providing comfort while others conve unease; with the same meticulousness, her use of a full choir transcends the conversational intimacy of a few backing vocalists, as in ‘Takes One’, which aims for a sweeter, more hopeful resolution than ‘Feed My Release’: “Someday you’ll find another love,” Bock sings, alone, after an expansive instrumental passage, but it’s as if she’s repeating back a line from the universe.
But even at its most affirmational and contemplative, Below a Massive Dark Land is not without contradictions: “I pray that I stay gentle, fragile,” she sings on the opening track, which turns out to be the most rambunctious. Throughout the album, the prayer becomes a practice: through the carelessness of ‘Kaley’, the empathy of ‘Lines’, and the introspection of ‘Further Away’, which Bock wrote after buying a bouzouki during a holiday in Greece. By the end, or so the record’s sequencing suggests, Bock seems to have quieted the noise that bleeds through the beginning of the album, allowing mostly just her voice and acoustic guitar to grace the two final songs. As much beauty and nuance as her collaborators bring on the album, it feels like the right conclusion. “I cannot find/ This star that once was mine,” she sings finally, but rather than assuming it’s died, she offers the possibility that it’s “gone to grace another.” And if so, is it not something that binds them, however briefly, under the same sky? Is not the transaction some form of assurance, a universal cycle? Bock doesn’t go as far as to make any such assumption; in the moment, she’s only mourning. But given time, she’ll follow and cast out whatever light comes her way, no matter the distance.
