No abundant bright bloom of flowers on the CD cover
or obscure Latin in the title or gentle dance of cursive font describing the
song list, nothing can hide that this is not your light-and-breezy summer
release of cruising-with-the-top-down jams, but rather, a full-blown concept
album of folk hymns about the art of dying.
The Art of Dying (officially Ars Moriendi)
represents a brave and risky move for the make-it or break-it breakout album of
an up-and-coming band. The Collection’s courageous collection of orchestral pop
hymns chart and curate the grieving heart of a gifted songwriter and the
community of bandmates and fans that surround him.
At a time when the flame of the alternative folk
explosion still burns bright despite much backlash, this North Carolina
ensemble shows up as the son of Mumford and Sons, married-to-Edward Sharpe’s
second cousin, with too many members to pack the tiny stages of clubs and bars,
with a sound fit for mountaintop vistas and songs as mystic visions that pierce
the veil between life and death.
Despite the heavy earnestness of the entire package,
it’s exactly the grief-support-group that my ears need, and I imagine a
rendering of fragile faith and hope against hope that our world craves. The
Collection manage to sing about Jesus and Thomas and the prodigal son without
getting pushy, dancing on the fringe of explicit CCM, exploring
sacred-meets-secular crossover paths and gritty crossroads that groups like
Needtobreathe, Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors, and Gungor have already
traveled.
Death remains that earthly finality to render our
denial mute—and our religious musings about whether it represents cosmic
reunion, bodily resurrection, or eternal rest are powerless when we admit that
the mysterious premonitions of the “heaven is real” crowd are but passing glimpses
and not bulletproof facts. The Christians that remain relevant in our world
have invested in the Kingdom here, now, and all around us, and they don’t shove
tracts that guarantee afterlife fantasies in our faces on the same
streetcorners where tramps and hobos sleep and sometimes starve.
This album is everything but a tract, and a cosmic
creation consciousness drips from every track as David Wimbish invites
listeners on the single “Gown of Green” to “Stop looking at the ground, start
looking at the leaves” because “up among the dirt and rust is where the kingdom
breathes.”
This kingdom doesn’t suckle at the unenlightened
nipple of mindless obedience to stiff doctrine, yet instead it feeds on seeds
and weeds and breeds wild green freedom for the dangerous disciples daring to
“sow the earth with diligence and love.” Anthems for an anarchic 21st-century
faith do not come with pat power-point slides and tidy handouts and
bullet-point programs for salvation.
Wimbish moans with melody and groans with gravity
what we were already thinking: “a cross hangs around your neck so loose/and
though it brings you life, sometimes it feels just like a noose/but god is not
disappointed in you/but love and beauty haunt you in your dreams.” The
Collection sip from the overflowing cup of spiritual freedom, and one taste of
this new wine might make bland another taste of the lukewarm life-numbing
churchianity still making its way around the land.
As my daddy departed this earth this past May, I
must confess many attempts to review this album have been interrupted by
uncontrollable fits of weeping. The solemn-yet-exuberant trance invoked by
these songs does not easily evoke translation as a regular record review. These
ruminations about death inspire a rant against death: I want to dance and
scream and just cry some more. There is an emptiness on the other side of
emptiness where it can feel pointless to carry on, because, we’re all just
going to die anyways, right?
How quickly gratitude can give way to apathy when
you suffer from the lazy grief of which C.S. Lewis wrote an entire book.
Wimbish wonders if he even has the “right” to sing his songs in this world
filled with wrong. I feel the same way about writing this review, not to
mention the countless poems and sermons and social media statuses I continue to
crank out, about a laundry list of worldly hopes and woes. Is anyone even
listening? Does anyone even care?
Did you ever wonder if Jesus ever asked himself if
anyone was listening to his crazy stitched quilt of parables and poems? Was
anyone even nourished from yet another dinner party, another feast of bread and
wine? Up-and-coming musical artists like The Collection don’t make much money
to speak of and often go into debt instead. Sadly, there are probably several
thousands of souls who would love to hear these songs but may not be plugged
into the blogs and indie radio and social scenes that would make it possible.
Yet—The Collection carries on anyhow, and those of us who get to wrap ourselves
in these sonic poems and potent songs are inevitably changed and charged to
share our reactions to these prophetic tunes. These tunes bring soaring
melodies, mythic crescendos, orchestral aches, sponsored by a rambling
circus-tent revival of songcrafters touring the country for just a few weeks in
a rented van, before many return to dayjobs as educators and artists and
theologians and recording engineers and foodies and what have you.
The Collection is a collection of friends I could
not have dreamed into being. They hold open the door to heaven for just a few
milliseconds, and the view is foggy with the limits of our vision, but the
songs are bigger than they are, bigger than we are, and they are a form of
poetry that even poetry cannot touch. Somehow, I hear angels, and my dead Daddy
has a new body and is dancing with me.
