Pitchfork

When the Skygreen Leopards played La Nortena in Brooklyn this past Halloween, their rapturous vocal interplay and loping instrumentation turned a clammy taco/burrito establishment into a dense forest teeming with overgrown flora and fauna. Partially obscured behind a pile of amps and other equipment, Jewelled Antler kingpin Glenn Donaldson and Donovan Quinn, aka Verdure, gently explored the sunny Kenneth Patchen territory nurtured on last year's One Thousand Bird Ceremony. It was an understated and shadowy but assured performance.

The duo mines a similar dominion on Life & Love in Sparrow's Meadow and the headier, already sold-out companion 12", Child God in the Garden of Idols. Adorned in Donaldson's lovely surrealist collages, Life & Love's moss-covered reel-to-reel rollicks and shakes, mixing a seemingly endless supply of instruments (jaw harp, 12-string guitar, dulcimer, flutes, banjo, jingle bells, harmonica, etc.), field recordings, chirpy pine needle melodies, and lyrics involving Egyptian birds, waterside tents, patchwork dream languages, orange blooms on fire, ballrooms of glitter and tambourines, hinterland holy places, Blakean mythologies, and other strange/beautiful things.

On the jubilant "Minotaur (Burn a Candle for Love)", Donovan sings of a shepherd who "Wishes he was a prairie bird/ But instead he's a butcher's son/ Dreaming of painted, panther-eyed girls" until Donaldson issues an ecstatic boy-flutes-can-rock bridge. But whatever the subject, Donaldson's aromatic, pristine falsetto aims for the upper branches and baby-faced Quinn's breathier scratch drifts through the sage-drenched undergrowth, telling tales of girls who take their names from saints.

Musically, the pop psychedlia is finely tuned. Jaunty opener "Mother The Sun Makes Me Cry" ushers in an assortment of archetypal sunny Skygreen Leopards sing-a-longs, but the standouts here are the four downtrodden pieces, especially "The Supplication of Fireflies" and "A Child Adrift". On the former, an ocarina dances with a ringing guitar behind Quinn's libretto ("Fireflies rejoice/ Fireflies send their sparks across the skies/ Heavy words fly up like ashes/ They scatter into lightness/ The blackened walls tumble/ The fireflies dance") and a harmonizing chorus. The track ends with a nighttime snippet of what sounds like a frog pond-- croaks, chirps, waterlogged crickets. "A Child Adrift" is Donaldson's time to shine. He leads a lovely attack with echoing Wordsworth vocalizations that coast over Quinn's sighs, and a lonesome guitar accompanied by tambourine and the faraway echoes of a "bleeding whippoorwill guitar."

These junkshop questing, alchemical high naturalists don't offer much variation in their album-to-album approach, but the gentle insistence on a singular aesthetic lends an aura of a protracted ceremony. And though recorded humbly in a trailer on a horse ranch, the difference between this and past Leopards works is a slightly sharper recording quality-- though, fortunately, background hiss/upfront breaths remains-- as well less time given over to unadulterated field recordings, airy instrumental passages, and doses of Thuja/Blithe Sons-style agrarian drone.

While Life & Love is tighter than previous albums, the tumbledown song-by-song feel is anything but constrained. No matter how often you spy these Californian versifiers darning their grassy knoll, there's a sense of rambling, ad hoc discovery in each new layer, fallen leaf, and jubilant pigment, as the two construct a decaying tree-fort of silver threads and the most beautiful baubles. Forget the band's patron poetic saint Kenneth Patchen: This is the music Keats and Shelley could be making if they were astute finger pickers who possessed an intimate knowledge of the west-coast landscape, blissful psychedelia, and a skyborn Ziploc bag of Coleridge's Edenic opiates.