Reichenbach Falls make significant strides and take a few detours on their second LP

With the recent release of The Traitor Shore and the benefit of hindsight, it has become increasing likely that “you” were wrong, difficult as that promising, if incohesive, first collection of songs may have been to decipher. Reports of Snow found Davies and his rotating cast of contributors flitting between fingerpicked folk-pop reminiscent of Iron and Wine (“Blinded By The Flash”) and the “Piano Man”-lite shuffle of “The Closed Colleges” with an ease that left more questions than answers about what, exactly, Reichenbach Falls wanted to be.

Three themes tied it all together: heartbreak, sharp lyricism, and Davies’ wavering voice, which sounded at times as unsure of where it fit among the instrumentation as some of the songs did of where they might fit on the album, as though Davies were too busy concentrating on hitting every note correctly and forgot to just sing in the process.

On The Traitor Shore, he sounds sharper than ever before, both vocally—his voice has settled somewhere between the laid-back tunefulness of Jeff Tweedy and the gravelly frailty of Tom Waits—and lyrically. When that enhanced precision meets the subtly scaled-back arrangements of this second album, the results are nearly always tantalizing and occasionally tremendous. Everything comes together early on highlight “Departure Lounge”, an abandoned lover’s daydream about making amends before being actually, you know, abandoned, that sounds like a forgotten late-90’s alt-rock radio staple.

“Magic” follows by pairing a clever metaphor for a dysfunctional relationship (“everyone saw the girl cut in two/ and the man never did disappear” is as clear an explanation of co-dependency as I’ve ever heard) with jarringly laid-back guitars, a striking contrast that emphasizes just how quickly turmoil can become mundane and even agreeable. “Outclassed” is similarly muddled, a gorgeous fingerpicked ballad whose meaning shifts depending on your perspective like the Mona Lisa. Is it an anthem for lasting love or a breakup ballad? Whatever it is, it’s always looking at you.

On the strength of those three tracks alone, it’s clear that Davies is an excellent writer. But every writer needs an editor, and Davies is no exception. The two longest tracks on the album, “Orphans” and “Buses”, are positioned as centerpieces, but neither quite achieves its ambition, threatening instead to drag everything to a slow if pleasant halt. When “Branches” — an uncharacteristically clumsy analogy wrapped in swaying strums and octave leads — follows, it’s easy to wonder if he’s capable of killing his darlings at all.

But he's saved his best for last, and the true centerpiece of the album comes at the end. On “Canada”, he weaves sly references to two Canadian folk musicians — Gordon Lightfoot and Stan Rogers — to two shipwrecks — one real (the Edmund Fitzgerald) and one imagined (the Mary Ellen Carter) — and to his own Canadian heritage and sense of home into a tangled emotional knot of a song that becomes more rewarding to pick apart with each listen.

With several song titles referencing travel or rootlessness, it’s easy to infer that the man behind Reichenbach Falls is searching for something he hasn’t quite found yet. But The Traitor Shore provides some beautiful 3 x 5 snapshots of the road that will take him there. Now more than ever, Abe Davies is truly on the brink of something.