Do No Harm is an enveloping pastoral plea for peace from superb and meticulous record label Keeled Scales’ newest signing The Deer. After starting as a solo project for vocalist and frontwoman Grace Rowland, the Austin five-piece has found its stride, finding itself as at home on festival stages as in the multiple studios where they recorded their fourth album of spacious transcendental folk, including a couple of tour stops, one in Colorado and another in an Airbnb in California. Do No Harm follows the band’s second and third albums, 2015’s On the Essence of the Indomitable Spirit and Tempest & Rapture in 2016 respectively, both focused in part on the death of backup singer Stephanie Bledsoe, who passed away in a tragic accident not long after the release of the band’s 2013 debut An Argument for Observation; this fourth album draws its inspiration from peacemaking.
Do No Harm takes its title from the Hippocratic Oath, its significance on the album pulled from a line in track six, “Stark Raven,” a mournful and contemplative track with clean round guitar tones and vocals reminiscent of Kate Bush, “that calls birds from all directions to come together and agree on how to allow a state of peace for all.” Rowland described the U.S.’ perpetual involvement in wars since her high school days as a primary influence on the album’s content. Coming from a multi-generational military family, Rowland acutely feels the toll of the never-ending call to service. In press materials, she shares a beautiful story:
When my father’s parents died, they left behind some photo albums from their time working for Bell Helicopter in Iran in the late 70s, before the revolution. Eerie and grainy, these photos changed the way I thought about my deep Texas roots, the way I saw my homelife and my country. After learning of the escalating threat of conflict with Iran this year, I went and found the photo album and rendered some of the pictures in cut paper.
One is a couple of men walking through the garden outside the tomb of the poet Saadi in Shiraz, the other is a group of American and Iranian kids playing together in the street. I gave them a swirling effect that spirals them out from their time into ours, and into this new phase of our world’s ongoing struggle for peace. I see my hardened Southern grandpa reading Saadi’s honied words of oneness, and I see them both open like flowers.
Album opener “Confetti to the Hurricane” bursts out of the gate with a rollicking ferocity, a distant cousin to Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire” with Rowland’s rapid-fire vocals churning across the track’s nearly four-minute runtime, just begging for a gang-serenade into a hot mic on karaoke night.
Lead single “Move To Girls” is about telling someone how you need to be loved, as Rowland tells Brooklyn Vegan, “Tour six months out of the year and tell me you don’t re-evaluate your whole life every time you leave.” Opening with close vocals layered with harmonies and acoustic guitar, this pastoral piece goes deep, employing a plucked mandolin solo and arpeggiating guitar in its most reflective moments.
The Deer refers to “Swoon” as a conversation between the peacemakers on all sides to dispel injustice. Rowland tells Billboard, where the track premiered:
I don’t think you can use the general, giant platform of social media to be the barometer in this situation; It’s always the loudest people who are heard the most and always the most radical ideas and inflammatory statements that get the most reaction. But I think in peoples’ own personal, quiet worlds there’s a lot of healing happening, and a lot of discussions and hearing that wasn’t there before we became so divided. “Everyone is getting tired of the rhetoric, tired of the division. There are people working for peace everywhere around us who aren’t screaming about it, just doing their work.
The Deer work toward peace in their own backyard, supporting the Other Ones Foundation, an organization that combats homelessness in the band’s native Austin. The enveloping single features fingerpicked guitar, upright bass, fiddle, and beautiful upfront vocals with a single harmony shadowing it throughout most of the track. Sprightly mandolin is sprinkled throughout, exploding on the outro with a ripping solo. The song’s energy is electric and its sound reflect its lyrics, a “spiraling swoon” indeed.
With an array of peace-summoning references from Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five (“Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt”) to 1960’s rock opera Hair (“Walking in Space”), on their Keeled Scales debut Do No Harm, The Deer deliver a mature and well-crafted album of enveloping transcendental folk to get lost inside.
Photo by Letitia Smith
