There is just something that tickles my brain about the phrase Astral Suitcase. Like is it the preferred luggage you take with you while exploring the cosmos on the Galaxy Express, or is it more like a mobile biodome that you deploy to keep you safe while researching a heretofore undiscovered planet with a potential hostel atmosphere? Or is the Astral Suitcase something inside of you, a space of unlimited imaginative potential inturned in your own psyche, which, once unlocked, expands the realm of epiphany in all directions, flooding over the horizon and into infinity? I think if you asked Bill Baird, he'd probably say that all of the above would be applicable, but that his favorite, and closest to his heart, is his latest LP. Astral Suitcase (the record) doesn't have any clear boundaries to its sound or themes, but still manages to have a concrete sense of personality, a spacy folk record characterized by crisp, brushy guitar work and glacial-hued harmonics; it is both briskly subdued and monumental, open and reserved, gradual and quicksilver, like floating down the milky way on an iceberg made of squid ink colored ice cream. A heavenly breeze that shakes the stars like windchimes in the dead of night, their quiet echos felt in your bone before they reverberate in your ears. A river that flows over the edge of a Saturnine ring to fill the goblet of a visiting astronomic heir as he whizzes by on a golden asteroid. The final symphony of a lonely planet trapped in a drop of due gliding along the lip of a tulip petal towards an uncertain end. A ripple in an uncertain sky as it fluctuates from a clear blue patina to that of a milky periwinkle punch. A popped thought bubble that stains the air with an oily reflective resin and the smell of fear and moral clarity. Astral Suitcase is an unassuming record, that is much bigger on the inside than it appears from the vantage point of its exterior.
