Patrick Costello – “Baltimore City/Let the Brothers Breathe”

Other music does not complete after the last note has died- it becomes the air that sticks to your pores. But the Patrick Costello song Baltimore City/Let the Brothers Breathe is not a song it is a land scape of memory in sound. With the first note, there is no gimmick–just a hint of experienced reality, held along by a voice that speaks more softly and yet more amazingly. His voice is confessional, lamentational, a sort of hollering, yet also a matter-of-fact statement that smells like the clinging dust of forgotten streets. The harmonica breathes out like a relic, with lamenting longing and innocent nostalgia and guitar notes drifting by as close as near the brink of ache–whispering in your ear the unspoken histories of all neighborhoods and all souls.

There is no rush here Time goes about its business very patiently. It is in the interstices between notes where you can sense the heart beat of Baltimore… not a post card image, but a real raw one, full of undone stories: the air after a rain Fall, raw with moisture. There is depression, sure as death, but also a gaudy light of endurance gasping out in the wreckage.

Costello does not tell a story in his music–he calls. Not comfortable, but confrontational in its emphasis on what is left unspoken. You are left hanging at the edge of breathing and silence and transformed by the resonance of the truth of the song. When it does come to an end you breathe out too, altered, centred, spooked by the silent but insatiable pulse of a city.

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