Category: Folk

TRACK | Cotton Jones – Blood Red Sentimental Blues

5/5 golden merles

Michael Nau and Whitney McGraw have always had a great sense of production, properly documenting the smoke in the air, the curving and crashing that elevates the storytelling. This is still firmly in that tradition but a bit bigger.

When they gradually grew away from the charmed lo-fi folk of Page France, the goal seems to be to create a warm ambiance of fertile soil in which to grow their melodies.

“Blood Red Sentimental Blues” would work as a title alone. But there’s a lot more to it than that. The organ cements the foundation of the thing. The dual vocals route a pincer maneuver on the heart. When the tambourine track clicks the drum into a richer stereo around 1:23, all of this gets more tactile. It is eminently lovely stuff.

TRACK | Long Neck – Gardener

5/5 golden merles

“Gardener” is a track which dwells upon dichotomy, the contrasting duality of both the sheer wonder and staggering fatigue of being. This is a report from the doldrums accompanied by a concerted reaching for the will and hope to continue. Not only that but to move one step further, to inspire the self and others, and to reassure among great doubts.

Music is a tool that can serve many purposes. I’ve used the term “commiseration” a good amount recently, but it is well suited and applicable here. I’ve listened to this track probably 100 times over the last couple of days. I need and appreciate the commiserating. The twist toward the track’s conclusion, after the recounting, to rally in concerted effort at contorting fate to good, is comforting.

The song is not solely a faithful account, which has value in itself and the act of ‘making’ is an implicit means of acknowledging this. But the lyric pushes further, and conscious of the subsequent self, appreciates explicitly its own agency and capacity for altering or influence. The strings help elaborate upon this ascending. There is a breadth of backing vocals, their intermittent choral convalescing the community referenced within.

There is some cutting humor and much truth in the contrast of lines like: “mornings are unbearable,” I said to no one / and they responded, “but won’t you miss it when it’s gone? And it reminds you of the old joke, “The food here is terrible.” / “Yes, and such small portions.”

In any case, I found it from Jon Doyle’s beautiful writing about it at VariousSmallFlames.co.uk, and you should read that assessment.

TRACK | Armandinho – Fado Fernandinha

5/5 golden merles

If you are looking for a moment of masterful melodic phrasing and elegant passages interweaving, Armandinho’s (Armando Augusto Freire) His Master’s Voice sessions are a bounty.

100 years out and fresh as a daisy, this is somewhere near the highwater mark of honing the craft and feels like something rich/nourishing to draw upon.

With everything defined by death, it arrives within the interwar years between the first and the second. I don’t know when they were written, but this is the time of their recording, at least, 1928-29. Perhaps written in recovery and optimism before the calamity, the depression, the carnage.

In either case, the interpersonal can provide conflict or rejoicing at any period and everything is relative to subjective circumstances. Add in the abstraction of pure instrumentation and you’re free to draw from it whatever you like, pure admiration of form or this accompanied by the imagined intentions of the dead. In my ignorance, I personally think about the eternal, and true, and cliché Brecht quote 10 times a day, “In the dark times will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing about the dark times.”

Whatever the case may be, we’re very fortunate to have these recordings of a real genius, such a lovely document. Please check out the full set here, there’s nearly an hours worth of reverence.

TRACK | Maggie Carson – From Here To Anywhere

5/5 golden merles

Second single off the up-coming The Dark Was Aglow (June 24th, Open Ocean), “From Here To Anywhere” is Americana full of vibrant twang and vengeance. A fanged and full-throated track which demonstrates that anguish is the engine of revival.

How do I leave / if the road’s just a halo?

There is a remarkable rising to it. With much might and lightly mangled, a strong and rousing performance has been captured. There’s great range and effect as the vocal rises to meet the instrumentation, the swelling synth and glittering banjo elevating alongside. It’s part commiseration, part rallying cry.

Having toured and performed with acts like Sharon Jones, Dr. Dog, and Nana Grizol, there seems to be a quality and breadth of first-hand and collaborative influences to pull from. It is a small spectacle, drawing on some subtle genre fusions while at heart remaining in the folk-traditional realm.

Open Ocean is not-for-profit record label with a donation and gift contribution model of acquiring both the vinyl and digital editions, suggested at $30/$10 respectively. I have seen plenty of pay-what-you-want digi releases, but none yet in the physical form, so please consider supporting these Rockaway Beach based operators.

TRACK | Twain – Young God (gotta lotta feeling)

5/5 golden merles

Twain’s “Young God (gotta lotta feeling)” is a bundle of tones and tethered vibrations, plaintive and patiently emitting. It functions on its own accord, a kind of Americana with spirit; unfortunately an exception to the rule.

There’s a kind of masterful, natural skewer and slouch to the unfolding instrumentation, definitely some majesty among the assembled merits. Not overworked, but still intricately plotted, just enough without getting lost in form or sacrificing the feeling.

And it builds up to something moving and unencumbered: naturally ascending tambourine, flush with guitar and a parading piano. Part of its glory is not being able to pin it down or put it dead under the glass. But some copy of it has been captured and maintains the illusion of a living body. And that can be bought for $8-20 in various forms.

TRACK | Simon Joyner – Joy Division

5/5 golden merles

Shattered in the heart and scattered in the brain... you asked for a chorus but you got a refrain.

Such is the quality of the storytelling that I’m hearing it for the some-hundredth time and still unearthing new lines or implications within couplets.

It probably gets a bit tiring being called a songwriter’s songwriter. But I have no time and I refuse to look into it. It’s a great compliment. Please just take the compliment, Simon.

The track is full of wonder, much compelling musing and brooding. It hosts a novella of characters conveyed in rapid sequence, their dialogs interleaved and exposed in momentary visions. The pastiche is formed from a scattershot of misgivings, commiserations granted a ceremonial quality, and articulated in a structured sequence that captures a larger feeling chronically an era of impressions. The thread is maintained in a consistent tone from a narrator that endears throughout by the beauty of his phrasing.

It is a testament. And it is beautifully balanced to captivate. If it wasn’t immediately apparent from the tremolo and distortion off that early strumming, when the instrumentation hits around the four minute mark, and the wailing rises to meet it, there is created a small clearing. You can escape for a couple minutes into it.

TRACK | Mount Eerie – Voice in Headphones

5/5 golden merles

Julie Doiron (Eric’s Trip) and Phil Elverum (The Microphones) collaborate in this nocturnal, potable mantra of a track. The harmonies here are special and good. The content balanced across that form (“It’s not meant to be a struggle, up hill”), recurrent and reaffirming, is about as close to some therapeutic advising you’ll get in America without a silver spoon to exchange.

I saw Phil Elverum (as Mount Eerie) play in a high school gym somewhere I think in southern Indiana. I don’t remember when, but it was during or shortly after college, maybe 2005-8. Nobody I knew wanted to go but I was hopelessly invested in The Glow Pt. 2. He sat on a metal folding chair or stood in the middle of the basketball court and played a lot of songs I didn’t know. But they were good, kind, inspiring things.

I am most familiar with Julie Doiron from 2009’s tremendously heartfelt and forged I Can Wonder What You Did with Your Day. I’ll write about that later, at least one of the tracks. To my not immodest discredit, I haven’t listened to much Eric’s Trip, but look forward to doing so.

TRACK | the lentils – dark days

5/5 golden merles

“Dark days” has a rich interweaving of language and imagery, with much invention and insight to it. Some passages unfold like a series of pronouncements related only in the context of the authors life, but there’s much to relate to within the common era as described.

Illustrative and confessional, the primary preoccupation of the author seems to be achieving a greater capacity for kindness and to apply self-criticism where it is found lacking; to summon and to wonder.

they’re looking to buy the rain
but their hands are too small
let the gods that are still left alive
obscure the fly balls

Recontextualizing these myths while drawing on the poetic history is a valuable and entertaining dialog to construct, for me. I love a good line humanizing gods in their mundane pursuits. It reminds me of another from Amy Annelle’s “Forever in-between“: your gods are tired of you following them around.

Pinter writes, “But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.”

So why not many, an array of them within the work, same song, line by line? The narrator is reliable enough, time itself is faulty. They refuse to be bound within the boring, linear structures, subverting them as another means of addressing their limitations, stretching the codified uses of language. The good balance is struck, a fun and frightful dichotomy. $5, here.

TRACK | Fievel is Glauque – Bring Me to Silence

5/5 golden merles

Gods Trashmen Sent to Right the Mess is a devastatingly catchy 2021 jazz/rock/pop album soon to be reissued on vinyl through Kit Records. There is revealed within great creative invention and problem solving, keeping each moment imaginative and alive. It’s coalescing on a variety of levels and by each player, in the language/phrasing and all across the individual contributions from the accompanying instrumentation.

What’s the use of blowing flutes / at a mad hyena on attack?

For example, lines like this are landing particularly effectively here after this week of craven madness, in which evangelical regressives attempt to drag our localized civilization back into a pit we’ve only very recently scaled. But there are many like it throughout: scathing, soothing, thermal, the echo of something that was extant at the time of recording.

And without a doubt part of the goodness of what has been captured is the live energy of the room: the resonance of the moment, the throat clearing, an ambiance of the instrumentation played by humans and within an inhabited space. The document is direct. There is a record of the proximity of its performers, their audible range on an orb rotating in orbit at 460 meters per second, and the device engineered to faithfully replicate it.

An uneasy international coalition of postal service’s willing, I will at some point in the not too distant future be one of the 300 owners of this limited run vinyl ring in which the album is imprinted. Purchase through Kit or the bandcamp.

TRACK | Amy Annelle – Buckskin Stallion Blues (Townes Van Zandt)

5/5 golden merles

It is with rare exception that a cover is featured here. And usually only if it takes things in a strange and inventive direction, or I hadn’t ever heard the original.

Despite being a fan of Townes and very much loving classics like “Waiting Around To Die” and “Pancho and Lefty,” somehow managed to evade this track prior to hearing the Amy Annelle rendition.

I have written about Annelle previously, and her criminally underrated 2010 album The Cimarron Banks. Here that voice and method is combined with Townes songwriting in a era-spanning idyllic Americana partnership.

There may be plenty of Greenland sharks older than this nation, roughly 250-500 years in age. But within our nascent eons, and just either side of what appears to be the pinnacle of whatever it was supposed to be, this must be one of the finest collaborations to take place across the empire.

The Great Unveiling also features covers from other greats like Ray Davies, Billie Holiday, and Neil Young, and is only modestly requesting a $7.00 increment from wherever you store the digital representation of your wealth.