Go back to the future with Nighttime’s time-traveling wyrd folk spectacle Keeper Is The Heart. In eleven tracks, the musician behind the moniker Eva Louise Goodman (and friends) builds magical worlds on the back of a medieval musical sensibility.

Opener “Veil” pulls back the curtain on Nighttime’s fondness for ethereal vocal structures. Goodman appeals directly to the listener:

“Lift the veil of all of this hate

To see the fear at its base

I’ve carried it for years

I’ve carried its weight

And hold even still

The stillness it made”

First-person singular. Your English teacher in highschool warned you against it; your composition instructor in college said it was OK in some situations; and Hump Day News says “let it rip.”

Goodman plants her lyrical flag in first-person observational sketch territory. The sketches are sometimes realist, sometimes impressionistic, sometimes outer world, sometimes inner dimension. The subject matter weaves itself into impossible knots like a Möbius strip that never strays too far from the heart that beats at the center of the album.

“Curtain Is Closing” revives Goodman’s fascination with concealing and revealing. A curtain, as an object for metaphorical contemplation, is stickily self-reflexive. Metaphors, like curtains, reveal to the viewer previously unseen dimensions of reality. She rides the metaphor past the closing curtain to generalize the action of revealing and concealing, from the stage to all the world.

“The curtain is closing

The audience has been shown everything

–and the roses they are throwing

Hit the closing curtain and fall down to their end

–and the show begins again”

There’s a sense of pervasive mystery to a worldview guided by the possibility of constantly opening up into a hitherto unknown reality. Songs like “Ring of Fire” ramp up the mystery by providing pure instrumental soundscapes, with only a breathy chant giving a wind’s wisp of a hint at the subject matter.

It was the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer who picked out music as unique among all the arts for pulling back the curtain on the true nature of reality. Music gives us a sensible purchase on the inner will of the world, plumbing even deeper depths than the ideas communicated at more superficial levels of words and images. Nighttime doesn’t remain at these dark depths, as Keeper Is The Heart enjoys a good lyric, but the mood of the album feels like it belongs there.

On the penultimate song of the album “The Sea,” Goodman wheels out her Nico-damaged vocals with a light touch. Shout out to “The Way” as well.

Subtract a few layers of ambient ether, tone up the guitars, and you could have ghostwritten this song right into a Velvet Underground album. The overwhelming vastness of the subject matter makes it feel like the right song to end on, but Nighttime has one more water-based lullaby in waiting, “Across the Ocean of Time.”

Along with revealing and concealing, Keeper Is The Heart is a time-traveling album. There are musical tropes at play that feel positively medieval.

Recherché Americana, you could call it. It’s not quite experimental or avant. Most of the identifiable music techniques have already been explored and put to work. What is unique here is the choice to pull all these techniques together to create a mood that is powerful and precise. 

There’s a sense of being out of time, like the soundtrack to Sofie Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette. And the music pulls you into that disjuncture, pulling back the veil on a world as strange as the Red Room in Twin Peaks. Strange, but beautiful, and alluring. You wouldn’t necessarily want to live there, but if the stars align, it’s a magical place to visit.