Category Archives: Folk/Americana
Elephant Micah – Louder Than Thou (Product of Palmyra)
Elephant Micah
Louder Than Thou
Product Of Palmyra
Link: http://www.elephantmicah.com/
With calmness comes a big impact. Joseph O’Conell plays music like a gentle giant that resembles the stains of coffee residue on a coffee shop table and an acoustic that shatters the silence like the creaking of hardwood as a rickety old chair disturbs its placement. Its soft ambient folk rock is clearly an indication of isolated focus and an in-the-moment relationship with time and place.
In Bloomington, Indiana, there is a place called The Runciple Spoon. It sounds like something out of an Alice In Wonderland story, but the placement of the space gives way to Sunday afternoon meltdowns and casual late evening meet ups. Off the main drag, it’s been there forever (since around 1968). You walk in to philosophical conversations, someone buried in the corner with a book to their face, or someone with a pencil in the ear and newspaper crossword puzzle in hand. It all revolves around the artifacts that protect the house as time slowly dissolves. Here, all we have left nuzzled next to the cups of coffee and tea that is consumed is ideas.
A mantra to remind us to slow down and explore these ideas, Elephant Micah creates that aura in their music. The lazy tempos and floating melodies make this music a place we can go to where time simply fades away. They make constrained song structures turn into an expanse of sound. If you listen to Acetone’s York Blvd., you would understand where something like this comes from. Not sure they could pull off the drifting that Acetone accomplished, but the song that is contained within itself becomes beautifully unconstrained. The last song on the album, “Airline Living” is the closest this comes to stretching across the universe. At almost six minutes thirty seconds, the band spirals away from the song, using a simple power chord strum to hang on by a thread. A fuzzed-out electric guitar makes us forget what it was we were listening to in the first place. But it does not make us forget how wonderful the rest of the album soaks into our senses.
You don’t feel its revel in the first song. “Tin Foil Continent” appears to be a lovely and simple folk tune. It’s a great introduction to Joseph O’Connell’s hauntingly gorgeous travelogue of the college town. Having a rich music community contributing to this release, you have musicians from Magnolia Electric Co., Dark Dark Dark, and Breath Owl Breathe bringing gorgeous elements into the fold and songs like “Won These Wings” and “Rooster On The Loose” sound better for it.
With every strum of the strings and soulful expression, you feel the soil and air that he breathes that emanate from the Southern Indiana hillside. O’Connell is one of the great observers and a wonderful storyteller to where you want to kick back some Sunday afternoon and let him do his magic on you.
Without a doubt, this is one of the finest Midwestern singer/songwriter of our time. Louder Than Thou simply should not be ignored.
Jack Wilson – Jack Wilson (Fluff & Gravy)
Jack Wilson
Jack Wilson
Fluff & Gravy
Link: Jack Wilson at Fluff & Gravy
There are two songs I really like on Jack Wilson’s self-titled debut.
“The Watchers” is everything as good as any Almond Brothers Band song. It’s fitting for the Seattle-turned-Austin musician who builds that Southern rock base around his twangy voice. Judging from this song alone, you would assume Wilson to be a big Creedence fan.
“Black Hills Fiction” slows things down to a lazy Sunday afternoon crawl. The slide guitar sways in communication with the fiddle that builds off the slight bluegrass nudges to a Texas landscape. It all points to a simpler time with little expectations of timeliness. However, it also shows us a more tumultuous time in the lyrical aspect that it tells through a three-part narrative (told from a native, a prospector, and a soldier), the humanitarian disaster of the Black Hills Gold Rush. The song is set up where it could bounce around to infinity, all tucked away in a meditative state that bodes as much quality and finesse as any historical song sung about the Titanic.
You feel a closer bond to the Texas geography than you do the acoustic folk influence from his Seattle upbringing. And I think there is more charm in that than say a song like “The Truth.”
And “Valhalla” does too much to try to please the listener, showing off its glitz through some horns when all it really needs is Wilson himself. It shows Wilson trying to break free of the limitations that nest him into a certain style, but the effort has to be further extended for a reaction to take place. “Valhalla” just
“Fell Inside” is very much ripped out of the style of Alejandro Escovedo, even down to the song title. It’s everything Escovedo would write with simple desperation of understanding human nature.
Not everything will lure you into Wilson’s world, but there are those moments that will get you.
The Alialujah Choir – The Alialujah Choir (Jealous Butcher)
The Alialujah Choir
The Alialujah Choir
Jealous Butcher
Links:
Alialujah Choir Official Site
Alialujah Choir on Facebook
Many times members from various bands who conjoin to form a singularity often make the mistake that super groups or micro groups for this matter, get lost in the translation and what starts out sounding like a great idea, ends up to be a bad one. But for the Alialujah Choir, the choice is a good one
Combine Adam Shearer and Alia Farah of Weinland and Adam Selzer of Norfolk & Western and M. Ward and these three members make up The Alialujah Choir, a gentle folk trio who create just as much an identity as they represent their counterparts.
Not to downplay the lyrical aptitude of this band, but with the vocal harmonizing being a highlight, they could sing about any topic and still make it sound good. You don’t have to even listen to a word they are singing to enjoy this album as it all blends into the music so well, the vocals become an instrument.
The music is simple, letting each piece glimmer in its glory. Being a fan of both Norfolk & Western and Weinland, I enjoy the Sunday hangover sincerity of these songs. The care given to songs like an introspective number like “Way Too Soon,” or simple observation of social life on “The Laundry Song.” Every song gives a perspective to pop culture through the lens of antique styles and acoustic meanderings.
Their debut album is what it is. There are no gimmicks and the interpretations are clear. They beauty of all of this is just how well these three work together, you will consider them their own unique entity and not just some simple side project.
Fionn Regan – 100 Acres of Sycamore (Heavenly Recordings/Cooperative Music/Downtown)
Fionn Regan
100 Acres of Sycamore
Heavenly Recordings/Cooperative Music/Downtown
Links:
I used to be a huge Nick Drake fan. I thought no one could do better, and to this day, I still tend to argue that theory. Who in their right mind could even match the aura of Drake’s vocal chords. I did not think about it until I heard Jeff Buckley’s Grace. Then it became apparent that I found someone who I could respect as a singer/songwriter the same way I felt towards Drake. The feelings resurfaced years later when I discovered Iron & Wine’s The Sea & The Rhythm. The subtle EP blew my mind, not in the same way that Nick Drake’s Pink Moon did but a way that complimented this logical progression of musical acoustic greats.
And then a few years ago, I attached myself to an album by A.A. Bondy titled When The Devil’s Loose. The album was so impacting, that I am still amazed every time I listen to that album. He writes with the intent of turning his songs into timeless classics.
Something great tends to come along when I least expect it. It happens out of nowhere, or at least that is how it feels. For Fionn Regan, 100 Acres of Sycamore is not his first album. The End Of History was a great introduction to the Irish singer/songwriter. But for me 100 Acres of Sycamore is the album that did it for me, and I can link him with the musical greats that lead up to this moment. And more than being an incredible release, this is an album that is influential to Irish musical history.
But where his style is traversed is that instead of using traditional Irish folk to motivate his songs, he looks towards the British style of traditional folk music. The only thing that lays planted in Irish tradition is his accent.
I hear the title song, and I cannot help but associate it with the Amazing Blondel or Incredible String Band. To start of an album like that is quite the spectacle, not in an explosion of light but like a proud shimmering glow that gives you hope.
And not like “Sow Mare Bitch Vixen” is anything less satisfying, but the lyrics seem a little off-putting to the style he is presenting, especially when you pair it up to a song like “The Lake District,” an incredible postcard-like folk song.
“North Star Lover” is as great as any John Denver song. And when you hear “Golden Light” flashbacks of every religious-oriented folk album comes flooding into your mind. And if you had parents who became adults in the ‘50s/early ‘60s, then these albums are tucked away in the album storage bin next to that big phonographic stereo sitting in that living room.
100 Acres Of Sycamore is that cool breeze you inhale in from the morning dew. It’s refreshing, intimate, and expressive. It’s a lovely serenade of acoustic musical bliss, and I cannot see myself without it as much as I can see myself abandoning Pink Moon. It just won’t happen.
Sassparilla – The Darndest Thing (In Music We Trust)
Sassparilla
The Darndest Thing
In Music We Trust
Link: Sassparilla’s Official Website
What an appropriate name for a roots rock/bluegrass/saloon romper of a band. When you listen to The Darndest Thing, you can smell the tar coming from the train tracks and feel the steam emitting off of the steamboat during a lazy trip down the Mississippi.
It’s as easy as that. Sassparilla is escapism to a simpler time, marred by a time of transit, progressiveness, and social change. Morality is in question, and mortality always looming one step behind, and music being a catalyst for both.
Sassparilla is a band from Portland. With a group that consists of Kevin “Gus” Blackwell (vocals, cigar box guitar, national resonator guitar), the father and son combo of Ross “Dagger” MacDonald (harmonica) and Colin “Sweet Pea” MacDonald (washtub bass), Naima (vocals, accordion, washboard), and Justin Burkhart (drums), they have the potential and reputation of creating a sonic blast of sweat-socked hootenannies. But a listen to The Darndest Thing, you feel more folk-rock tugging at their shoulders and a laid-back approach to their dog days concoctions.
Besides the Southwest, Portland would be a logical destination to inspire a band to create a mood like this. I would call The Darndest Thing kitschy in the most unconventional of terms and for Portland standards, trendy in the most unsuspecting of ways.
According to Blackwell, every record that this band does is a little different each time, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise making something a little more sedate and brooding was in the cards. But it is. It also helps that The Eels’ Chet Lyster is at the helms of the production booth. That helps explain the direction the band took with this album.
“New Love” starts us out with a swampy drawl like a low-lit cabaret buried in the Deep South. It combines the sin and salvation with lusty desires. But “Same Old Blues” is like a street party that roams through the alleys and moss-covered streets of Savanna. It’s one of the more lively songs you will get on this album.
It’s not like “Bone Colored Moon” or “My First Lover” are snoozers in the slightest. Look at them as a more laid back, laissez faire approaches implied by conventional methods. On a song like the latter, the harmonica crying into the night sounds so tasty it almost hurts.
There are moments Sassparilla sounds a lot like early Alejandro Escovedo. It’s only when they present a smoothed-out roots rock vehicle with a life-burden contemplative tone to their lyrics does this come to light — “Fumes” immediately comes to mind.
But as the band prepares to make their grand exit with the song “You’ve Got It Bad,” it’s what we have come to know Sassparilla to be, the bearded bard twisting tales with the tongue by candlelit and a sketchy bottle of something in one hand. The fiddle wailing notes, more dramatic than the banjo’s picking. As the washtub bass serves as the rhythmic mediator between the two, it’s a fine departure and the close to another chapter in this band’s existence.
