Appealing Ambiance About All Things Complicated
The Milk Carton Kids, Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan, released their latest full-length album, I Only See the Moon, on May 19. The album is enamored with the duo’s signature acoustic guitars and harmonic vocals, with the accompaniment of a banjo. Lyrically, Pattengale and Ryan eloquently engage with an array of delicately interwoven thematic threads. Singular ideas regarding time, dreams, youthful ignorance, innocence and life’s tidal inertia become delicately laced into each song. Furthering the conception of the grander piece as a whole, this album is a beautiful and nuanced tapestry of celestial proportions.
Staying true to their Folk and Americana roots, “One True Love,” “When You’re Gone” and “Body & Soul” are powerful stories told in quick rasped vocals and dueling guitars. In “Wheels And Levers,” Pattengale and Ryan’s acoustics, like an incoming swell, guide their synergetic vocals as if they were “fading away” — it includes an organic vocal lilt that rises with the tide, then begins its outward flow into the sea from whence it came.
It is a beautifully seamless transition into the title track, “I Only See The Moon,” the cinematic centerpiece of the album. A sweeping orchestral concerto, singular in its performance. It would be easy to envision a midnight stroll along a Venetian canal, the crooner in an old black-and-white film drifting along cobblestone streets, shifting between the shadowed archways and the ochre glow of a milk-glass streetlight.
Instead “far away from prying eyes” and at the mercy of the sea we watch as “the waves break overhead, then wash away… they wax, they wane.” In solemnity the moon is visually all he can see paying homage to the inevitable phases of life. As the overarching timeline of the album’s narrative takes place in realms beneath the night sky, everything we hear is thus affected by the moon itself. Whether or not its presence is permanent, its presence leaves him “frozen” in stillness.
Pattengale and Ryan ruminate on the concept of having time to “kill,” minutes to waste at the beginning of the album. It is at the album’s conclusion where we recognize that time is a construct. Memories are no longer made in the moment but by realizing in the moment that something is a memory to be catalogued. To stress that notion, memories are used to showcase the fragility of our life in passing. They can be found somewhere between midnight and the break of dawn as “time slips on graciously.”
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