Solar Halos

Behind Solar Halos' Carrboro, NC practice space there are train tracks and a concrete factory. You feel the rumble of diesel engines and sliding stone as much as you hear it. Like the digestive noises of a nation-sized beast, it jars your teeth. It rattles your marrow. It makes you feel small.

Within Solar Halos' practice space, however, John Crouch (drums and percussion), Nora Rogers (guitar, cello, vocals) and Eddie Sanchez (bass, keys, vocals) take the long view. There is an even larger, more patient, more powerful beast, and it will level the field. "When time awaits / when monuments breathe / when mountains return to the sea," rings Rogers' clear and confident call over nuanced, propulsive sludge. "The calm water hides."

Human endeavor can rumble and rattle and challenge nature, like the heavy industry all around, or it can tap into forces older and more powerful than anything anthropocene. This is a band that thinks in geological time, and an air of levelheaded patience pervades even the most driving songs. With obliquely poetic lyrics that wax mystical and scientific both, Solar Halos sings to the stones, the grass, the sea, the stars and time itself.