Opening up to Matt Bauer’s The Island Moved In The Storm is like peeling back layers of small town mythology overheard from a bar stool one enmeshed story at a time. Something in this town, however, is particularly troublesome. In 1968 a woman is found dead along a road near Georgetown Kentucky—‘Tent Girl,’ as she’s called by the local media for the canvas she’s wrapped up in (unidentified for 30 years, until 1998 when she was revealed to be Barbara Ann Hackman Taylor). It is present on almost every whisper.
While Bauer’s album seems to tell tales from a dozen eerie sources, it’s in this real life myth that his images are wrapped, imagined, unraveled and spun. He doesn’t dwell in the why of—the songs on The Island Moved In The Storm are all word of mouth recollections, the happenings and their elaborations. On “Blacksnake In The Carport” he wraps his mythos around the slithery black snake, crawling headless through the tall grass. Soldiers, weeping women—they are players in the record’s darkest corners. Bauer’s voice—hushed, yet assertively sensual—colors the albums best tracks such as, “Barn Owl” and “Rose And Vine.” On the eerily topical, “As She Came Out of the Water” there are clues to Tent Girl, but then those vanish into the stream; the same one that takes away the island in the title.
Bauer’s work is simply astounding—not just on par with Samuel Beam’s Iron and Wine bittersweet ethos, but a rival to its haunting intimacy with the natural order. Recorded in cities across America (San Francisco, Brooklyn and Fayette County, Kentucky) and in the warm ambience of closets, bathrooms and attics there is warmth and absolute congruence from tip to tail. The sixteen songs on The Island Moved In The Storm feel as home spun as their story.
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