Bex Burch’s album, “There is only love and fear,” follows on from Jeremiah Chiu’s “In Electric Time” as another International Anthem release that broadens the range of the label further, into instrumental music that’s not easily classifiable, jazz-adjacent in some respects but also experimental. Burch herself calls it “messy minimalism,” which is as good a label as any. Across 12 tracks, Burch, who mostly plays xylophone, sanza, and various percussion, performs her compositions along with a bunch of other International Anthem-affiliated musicians, like Mikel Patrick Avery, Ben LeMar Gay, Rob Frye, Anna Butterss, Macie Stewart, Anton Hatwich, Dan Bitney, Diego Gaeta, and others. It’s an album, like a lot of International Anthem albums, that seems to revel in the possibilities of playing together, being open to chance and change, and finding the best expression of certain musical ideas. Burch’s album feels like wandering into a lovely workshop, where the practice of creativity is paramount, and the only product is beautiful music, delivered intermittently, patiently, sweetly.
“There is only love and fear” is bursting with creativity—there’s so much variety on this album, so many different little adventures. Some songs, like “Fruit smoothie with peanut butter” and “Pardieu,” are short, rhythm-driven, and groovy; other songs, like “Start before you’re ready” and “This is the sound of one voice,” are more spare, deliberate, unfolding slowly, a few elements unveiled at just the right time: xylophone, traffic noise, rain falling, shakers, keyboard, bass, sanza, voice. Field recordings are threaded through the album: birdsong (great birdsong), water, wind, footsteps, creaks, latches, chatter, cheering. It works so well with this music, inviting the world into these songs, like each track was recorded in the forest, on the beach, in the street, on a rooftop. Other songs, like “If I was you I’d be doing exactly the same,” sound like jazz songs taken apart and reconstructed, in this case, like a tune from “Sketches of Spain” slowly and gracefully reassembled before your eyes.
“Dawn blessings,” the first track on the album and one of my favorites, opens with the sound of birds chirping, light footsteps, and a cuckoo calling out. The cuckoo’s call is echoed then by Burch’s xylophone, and then again, in a kind of slant rhyme, by Hatwich’s bass. That’s the inciting incident for the song, and the band expands on those phrases: Avery’s drum picks up and Stewart’s violin plays slow, sweet phrases above it. As the track progresses, the band moves further away from those initial sounds and continues to deepen and complicate their groove. A staggeringly beautiful track on a brilliant album.