Horse Feathers, Thistled Spring
Music that welcomes you in and sings you to sleep
No one does delicate quite like Justin Ringle. Over the course of three records as Horse Feathers — a remarkably silly name for a band as earnest as his — Ringle has managed to stir heartstrings with just a gentle brush of his fingertips. His songs have a John Denver kind of warmth, at once familiar and comforting, tender celebrations of simple pleasures, like a warm hearth or a robin's song. Thistled Spring doesn't fiddle too much with the formula he perfected on 2008's masterful House With No Name; there are still plenty of twirling acoustic guitars and see-sawing strings, but the mood here is lighter and has a gentle, first-rays-of-sunshine glow.
Case in point: "Starving Robins," which moves slowly from rustling banjo to big orchestral rush right back down to rustling banjo — dying embers to roaring blaze and back again. If Ringle had a tendency to ball up his songs in the past, on Spring he's more willing to let them expand — even if only slightly. "As a Ghost" opens as a tender, strummed weeper, but soon the violin and piano swoop in, and it feels instead like Ringle is ready to swing 'round from one partner to the next. "The Widower" grows tense as it goes on, stern, chopping strings emerging like black waves at the song's center. Ringle manages both extremes, the sun and the storms, expertly.
But what Ringle does better than any of his peers is capture the feeling of a group of musicians sitting in a circle on the floor in a log cabin, playing late, late, late into the evening. There's a cozy, familial feeling to the songs on Thistled Spring; it's music that welcomes you in, and music that sings you to sleep.
