A Field Report from the New Country
Featured Album
Whither country music – or will it wither? Most of the c&w on strut at the recent CMA awards had more to do with 80′s power-rock and 00′s teen-pop than the morning farm report. In recent years, an alt-country movement in such Willy-billy suburbs as Brooklyn’s Williamsburg has waved a country flag, along with a taste for trucker’s caps and Pabst Blue Ribbon. This isn’t a sudden outcropping on the range; ever since Gram Parsons led the Byrds into cowpie’d pastures, rockers and folkers have painted the country muse in pastoral colors, a back-to-the-roots that signifies authenticity and traditionalism, and gives a lot of work to pedal steel guitarists (thank you!).
Now, even that rebel stance seems outdated – or at least assimilated. Far from having to be fo ‘or agin’, the many clans of country – I like to go back to the Carter Family, but most start at Hank Williams or Merle Haggard or Loretta Lynn, and then stop off at Steve Earle‘s house – are using the music not as self-conscious identifier, but as geographical placement, a sound that open-ends as city lights dim in the distance and the stars (or at least the lights in the roadhouse) begin to twinkle overhead. The feel is rural, reflective and sometimes wry, and there is time to consider each phrase, its resonance, explore its meaning, find a sound that matches it, even if it ain’t country.
I like to think of the releases gathered here as field recordings, not in the sense that they were harvested by a visiting musicologist, but their collective sense of place and moment places them between towns, as it were, neither here nor there. Where you find the back-road. Off the map. Go left when the GPS tells you to turn right. Get lost.
Laura Gibson is from Portland, the west coast’s stranger city; once home to the blessed Wipers and now the geographic perch of the Decemberists and M. Ward. Her songs grow from simply-plucked arpeggios on a gut-strung guitar, and she decorates them with inventive percussives and washing textures. Her second for Hush, Beasts of Season, has a winsome and winning un-affectation, managing to be expansive even within its spare, plaintive grace. Her last album, the 2006 If You Come To Greet Me, had a gossamer quality – “Wintering,” especially, seemed as if the first flakes of snow were falling over the Cascades, and “Country Song” was wish-fulfillment at its most comforting . But with the help of producer Tucker Martine, she has begun to unsettle and experiment. The wash of noise that opens “Shadows On Parade” silhouettes the music; “Spirited,” has ooh-oohs worthy of a classic girl group. With a cracked voice that recalls Melanie (perhaps the queen of askew-folk), or the balancing act of a Tegan and Sara, she divides the album into a “Communion Songs” quartet, and follows it with another foursquare of “Funeral Song.” Other Portlandings on the album are from Norfolk & Western and Laura Veirs. For a sign of her roots, the haunting Six White Horses, a 2008 EP which gathers such wellsprings of the canon as “Black Is The Color of My True Love’s Hair” and “Freight Train” is a stark reminder of her spiritual Appalachian home.
“Nothing Seems The Same” sings the Heartless Bastards ‘Erika Wennerstrom, and that’s certainly true if she looks around at the band’s rhythm section, which is new for this, her third release, The Mountain. What’s constant is her chopping rhythm guitar and tremulous vocals, as on the title track, the high cliffside harmonies of “Could Be So Happy,” the Creedence-having-a-bash of “Early In The Morning,” and the Stones-ish “Hold Your Head High.” “So Quiet” revolves around the gentler sound of a fiddle and a relentless banjo unfolding over a three minute instrumental coda; “Witchy Poo” returns to the chunky distortos of the album opener, accessing Led Zep. This is the country we live in, a melting pot, to be sure.
Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit is a true band, he hastens to tell us in the eponymous title of his second album. Hailing from Alabama, the rough-hewn assurance of a mournful lament like “Cigarettes and Wine” and the romping straight-ahead bash of “Good” display a confidence that is both muscular and tender, the kind of country either/or that whole dynasties of song have been founded upon. He has “No Choice in the Matter;” any tune with an electric sitar over a Memphis soul track has to be willing to integrate dualities. The album closer, “The Last Song I Will Write,” is a gem, and though I appreciate its sentiments, I suspect Jason and his argonautic 400 Unit are just at the end of the beginning.
More faithful to the back-to-the-country movement is Ben Kweller, who recorded Changing Horses in Austin, Texas. If he sounds wistful, even elegiac, it might be because the live-ish feel of the record, enhanced with sparkling slide and pedal steel work by Kitt Kitterman, feels like a promontory from which he can survey his tangled career. In the late 90′s, he headed Radish, which attempted to scale the heights of grand expectations and ultimately deposited him in New York not yet out of his teens. He kept on keepin ‘on, and his discography covers a range from the home-brewed EPs he made in his apartment to a self-titled solo album on which he played all the instruments (his official third) with empathic producer Gil Norton in 2006. For Changing Horses, the casual feel works best in songs like “Things I Like To Do” and the Gram-ish (there he be again!) “Fight,” and even a potential pain-song like “Hurtin ‘You” seems like the wound is already on the way to being healed.
In a more classique vein of country, the appearance of Laura Cantrell‘s albums on eMusic fills me with the same joy that I used to get riding around listening to her delightful Saturday afternoon show on WFMU, Radio Thrift Shop. If you can have a crush on someone through their exquisite musical taste, then she was my FM hearthrob; and when she started expressing her acumen through song, I was ever enchanted. Her first two albums, Not The Trembling Kind (2000) and When The Roses Bloom Again (2002) hewed to a country template, from “Churches Off The Interstate” and “Pile Of Woe” from her debut, and the aching “Conqueror’s Song” from her second. “Humming From The Flowered Vine” expands the possibilities of her voice, not so much light as lithe, and a song like “Old Downtown” has an affection for the past as it becomes future, surely country music’s most enduring virtue.
And enduring brings us to Willie Nelson. Phosphorescent’s tribute to country music’s most famous stoner, To Willie, sidesteps the style of most of da master’s most famous songs. Despite the admonition of “Pick Up the Tempo,” Mathew Houch approaches his songs in a manner even more laid-back than Nelson’s – which is no mean feat. And though this could have undercut the emotional undertow, Houch’s songs become more intimate, even fragile, as a result. “The Last Thing I Needed (First Thing This Morning)” and “It’s Not Supposed To Be That Way” fairly tremors with regret; “Too Sick To Pray” offers a hope of salvation among the ruins. You don’t get much more country than that.
