Blind Pilot album promises a heartfelt concern

Suffused with heartfelt sentiments comes Blind Pilot’s debut album, “3 Rounds and a Sound”.

With lyrics that are equal parts intimate and cryptic, Blind Pilot sounds, in their best moments, like happy entries of Elliot Smith’s journal set to swaying and slightly country-western guitars.

The slow, steady “Oviedo” opens the album with lead singer Israel Nebeker crooning in time to the lazy feel of summer while a mid-song brass section lends a decidedly Latin feel to a track about the tiny town in Spain for which the song is named.

The idleness of “Oviedo” stands in direct contrast with the uneasiness of “The Story I Heard,” a seemingly autobiographical ballad that tackles both a troubled past with an unsure and distant future, all permeated by a heart-breaking sense of fragility and awareness of life and death.

A slight reprieve from the sad subject matter comes in “Paint or Pollen,” a light-hearted ditty with ambivalent undertones exemplifying a new relationship’s sincere devotion, followed by the oddly optimistic “Poor Boy” in which the Nebeker repeatedly asks, in relation to a friend’s misfortune, “why shouldn’t it be me?”

Though songs vary in subject matter, tone, and rhythm from chronicling a hard-knock life to new love set to various western-inspired guitar pieces, they all contain the same “thread”; the opposite of detached observation, Nebeker’s voice betrays how very much he cares about what happens around and inside him. Despite the refrain “man oh man, you can do what you want,” “One Red Thread” conveys that caring tragically, beautifully, and with a sense of real humanity as the song alternates between slow strumming, fast picking and momentary silence.

“Two Towns from Me,” a confessional song about not wanting to lose a lover, is a moment of confusion in a sea of impossibilities. Ocean allegories and a spare, steady backbeat imbue the song with a dreamy sense of despair and longing as Nebeker, in the end of the song, realizes the self-centeredness of a doomed romance. “I had a dream you were two towns from me, got to sleep, spent the whole night running,” the song’s refrain, follows the theme of a number of songs on the album, which seem to be the result of a dream-state’s subconscious language.

A strangely buoyant apocalyptic gem follows on “The Bitter End”, a song with a dream-like quality similar to “Poor Boy” and “Two Towns from Me,” that list things the narrator would do if the world should end in a manner that is both hopeful and reserved.

The closer and title track “3 Rounds and a Sound” opens with the repeated line “they’re playing our song,” as Nebeker sings with an emotional honesty that aches with nostalgia at the death of a relationship atop the ever-present steady strumming.

At times, “3 Rounds and a Sound” sounds like a diary entry, and at others has the false bravado pride affords when one knows they’re wrong. In all their moments, Blind Pilot lends folk styling and emotional honesty to their debut. In all the right ways, “3 Rounds and a Sound” contains a fresh breath of life in a music industry that is seemingly lifeless.

Blind Pilot will perform live in concert at Highsmith Union in Alumni Hall on Nov. 6.

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