Meg Baird’s Don’t Weigh Down The Light: Audio Visual Transmission Guide #44/52a

Well, Meg Baird’s Don’t Weigh Down The Light…

A fair while ago I wrote about the Espers II album and how I seemed to rarely get beyond the first track Dead Queen…

Not because of any failing in the rest of the album but, well because:

“…it’s a song that swoops, sparkles, gently tilts you back into somewhere else. It’s epic and grand in scale but never verbose; a song full of glistening beauty, gentle and lilting but also one which subtly loops and returns throughout to something that touches on night dreams.

And I seem to find it hard to travel beyond it on the album; where do you go after something like this? It’s such a complete, swirling world of a song.

When I hear it I think of semi-lost privately pressed psychedelic/acid folk records from somewhere in the 1970s… but this is no straight replucking or homage; in many ways it shines a beacon as how to look to and draw from earlier source material but to bring it into today and your own vision.”

And now, here I find myself with a similar, not unpleasant conundrum regarding an album by sometime Esper-er Meg Baird.

I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to the first track, Counterfeiters, on Don’t Weigh Down The Light, fully with the intention of listening to the whole album but it just stops me dead in my tracks…

…for many of the same reasons as above, the same thing occurs here. Although I wouldn’t necessarily use the phrase epic, Counterfeiters is a very intimate song that draws you in and creates its own world.

This is a rather classy take on the source material of folk that carefully draws a line back to such things but which also wanders quite somewhere else. Entrancing indeed. Gentle, bucolic and also containing a subtle edge of melancholia, a glimpse of a world far removed…