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There is an intimacy to the music of Samana that one rarely hears today. Their third, self-titled LP, ensnares listeners in a world of inner hearts and complex feelings. Providing a view of the internal reaches of the soul, one is exposed to passion and pain that sometimes provoke furious flurries of sound exploding into the air, shattering the soft guitars and acoustic piano notes. As the ancient Sanskrit term samana reveals, their music deals with the ways of one “who abandons the conventional obligations of social life in order to find a way of life more in tune with the ways of nature.”
The vision of Rebecca Rose Harris and Franklin Mockett, developed in the deep Welsh countryside, focuses on an approach to life with artistic self-sustainability and the natural world at its core. Combining a dizzying array of instruments played by Mockett with Harris’s lyrical and vocal work, what they have created is masterful. Putting music to the beautiful but rugged landscape of Wales, the two delve into explorations, both of the kind we see along with that which can only be felt.
The simply strummed guitar that opens Into The Blue illustrates the flexibility of the voice Harris has with a dusky lower end. The shortest song on the album, it establishes a folky edge that seems to splinter into pieces as The Knife slashes with a second half that is as loud, harsh and intense as one is likely to hear this year. Electric guitar shatters the senses while the drums crash and synthesizer crawls under the skin, the lyric laying bare the tension, “To bury the speech deep inside of me/ Drains the sound from my mouth.”
Much of the lyrical content comes from Harris’s dream journals. The notion of search and escape fires the content of Two Wrongs from the forward momentum of riders on a freight train as these men and women voyage outside of the conventions of society and travel into the known unknown. Framing these songs with horns and strings provides additional power to music that seems to overflow with ideas and alchemy. This is music of exhilaration and release, sounds that gently stroke the senses, sometimes exploding with the kind of tension coming from deep inside one’s soul.
Samana is an album that haunts your inner reaches. As a band, Samana examines the soul, leaving one to start or restart life from a different, more enlightened point of view.
Samana is out now (24th May 2024) on their own The Road imprint.
