If you’ve never heard of the band Black Marble, that should change, and today’s as good a day as any for that to happen, because their new album, “Life in Small Spaces,” was just released on Sacred Bones.
Since I first discovered the band in 2012, when they released their debut album, “A Different Arrangement” on Sub Pop’s sister label, Hardly Art, I’ve followed them from release to release and label to label as they hopped from Hardly Art to Ghostly to, as of 2019’s “Bigger Than Life,” Sacred Bones. And as each of their five full-length albums replaced their previous as my new favorite record, I’ve been consistently surprised that more people aren’t constantly talking about this band and how amazing they are. And by “they,” I mean Chris Stewart, who is the man behind the marble, as it were.
In 2016, I was lucky enough to be asked by Stewart to write the album bio for their Ghostly release, “It’s Immaterial,” and I’ll quote myself now in describing the band’s sound on that album, which remains true for their latest, “Life in Small Spaces”: Soaring and muted all at once. It’s a collection of songs pieced together from perfect-seeming snippets heard while passing open doors. It’s a framework in which your imagination creates its own version of what you need to hear but didn’t have a way to describe – like a favorite song heard on an unlabeled mixtape by a band you can’t uncover.
Then, and now, songs like “Anything,” “Guess” and “Life Without,” off of the new album, take me back to being a pre-teen in the ’80s, when my little boyfriend’s older sister gave him a cassette of Depeche Mode‘s first album and we sat in my driveway, huddled around a boombox while playing it over and over, as though we’d discovered music made just for us.
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