Lea Thomas – Cosmos Forever (2024)

Review:
Lea Thomas’ songs are studded with natural imagery — flowers, rivers, sun and stones — and it is always sunny in the places where she sings. No hurricanes, no tornadoes, no extremes of heat and cold, no dangerous beasts live in these idealized parks and gardens. All is tranquil, serene, unruffled. And yet though the tone is gentle, elements of turmoil brew up from the nether depths of these songs. Big crashing guitar tones burst through latticed picking, and thwacks of drumming brace murmured verses. Thomas’ trick is so surround and envelope these dissonant elements with beauty, so that they intimate what’s outside her charmed circle without breaking its magic. This is Thomas’ second album, following the considerably more country rocking 2021’s Mirrors to the Sun. The debut had its breathy, fragile moments, but remained tethered to Americana song structures, a rough beat, an electric guitar vamp, a well-shaped chorus. Cosmos Forever is more ethereal, blowing in like dandelion fluff on a gentle breeze, weightless, frictionless and gorgeous. The title track, for instance, is all warmth and simplicity, just a few guitar chords and Thomas’ velvety intimations. “Scatter the seeds and flood the plain/Clover and grain/Sweet as the fruit that fills your basket high,” she sings, making the “golden summer” of later verses materialize in an almost physical way, heat on skin, insects buzzing. Later the buzzing low-end of electric bass bumps the song into swagger, and massed voices make it dizzy with overlapping sensation. The song is about the cosmos, but it starts small with the blooming weeds under your feet. Thomas is not afraid to give these songs time to blossom. An herbalist by vocation, she understands the virtue of letting things ripen on their own schedule. So, when “River Runs Through,” eddies and curls through seven minutes of album time, it doesn’t feel overlong. It feels like exactly the amount of time required to let this song get where it needs to go. Thomas lives in upstate New York now, but she grew up in temperate Hawaii, which may account for the softness, the ease of the natural world she evokes. “Bauhinia” grows out of the image of a tropical flower she likely first encountered in her island youth, a natural image fogged with memory and nostalgia. “Bauhinia/Purple flower/Bloom forever/In my mind,” she sighs as one guitar quietly strums, and another rumbles like distant thunder. The song slouches and sidles and insinuates its way into your brain, so that you can hear it long after the last note fades. — dusted

Track List:
01 - The Gift
02 - We Must Be in Love
03 - Cosmos Forever
04 - Bauhinia
05 - River Runs Through
06 - A Thousand Leaves
07 - You Belong to No One


Media Report:
Genre: dream-pop, indie-folk
Origin: Hudson, New York, USA
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)


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