North Carolina couple Bowerbirds have just polished off their third album: The Clearing is coming out March 6, on Dead Oceans. Its lead single, “Tuck the Darkness In,” is an elegant epic, building slowly, surely, towards a grandstanding crescendo of choral wails, orchestral squalls, and distorted guitars; heaving with a hugeness not heard, so much, on Hymns for a Dark Horse or Upper Air. “Well, the light was rust / and the cold was in our knees / and our breath poured out / over golden fields,” Phil Moore begins, sketching a winter walk in uncommonly-poetic language, as piano frolicks gaily over simple strums and unfettered drums, with vibraphone lurking deep in the mix. MORE