Category: Folk

TRACK | Sibylle Baier – Tonight

5/5 golden merles

Sibylle Baier’s Colour Green was “Recorded in the early 70’s in her home on a reel to reel recording device,” then sat unreleased for 40-50 years.

It is with a profound sense of dread that you consider this and realize that this set of tracks was one of the lucky ones. That most things of this caliber are, if recorded at all, languishing in moldy basements, storage lockers and landfills.

These were things that played live in a community, maybe, a handful of times, then had no outlet. Songs that the corporate scouting and release structure had no use for on commercial grounds, in a culture plagued by products. Ads on, in , and bracketing all media, like cancer in the body, determining what lives and dies. As artists or creators we have a responsibility to mitigate or eliminate this if possible.

Which is why Bandcamp is such a fine platform and model to emulate. Perhaps it will be bought out and crushed eventually. But for now it is the very best option available.

TRACK | Purple Mountains – All My Happiness is Gone

5/5 golden merles

Howdy, friends, ever bought a digital album from a dead man?

“Lately I tend to make strangers wherever I go / Some of them were once people I was happy to know”

In my estimation, if you ever write a line that good for the rest of your life, it was more or less worth it. David’s death coinciding with the release of this album reminds me a bit of some anecdote from Camus about a young author who wrote a novel then (in part) killed himself to promote it. The joke is that it did get the attention of the newspapers but the work itself was universally panned.

Unlike this dead fellow, Purple Mountain’s self title release is superb. The parallel is only the timing, the creative act, and the demise. I also greatly enjoy Berman’s poetry, like this from 1999’s Actual Air:

“Snow”

Walking through a field with my little brother Seth
I pointed to a place where kids had made angels in the snow.
For some reason, I told him that a troop of angels
had been shot and dissolved when they hit the ground.
He asked who had shot them and I said a farmer.


Then we were on the roof of the lake.
The ice looked like a photograph of water.
Why he asked. Why did he shoot them.
I didn’t know where I was going with this.
They were on his property, I said.


When it’s snowing, the outdoors seem like a room.
Today I traded hellos with my neighbor
Our voices hung close in the new acoustics.
A room with the walls blasted to shreds and falling.
We returned to our shoveling, working side by side in silence.


But why were they on his property, he asked.

TRACK | Big Thief – Certainty

5/5 golden merles

Similar to the stylistical influences of The Mystery Lights, Big Thief always appear to draw from something deeper &/or richer.

Adrianne Lenker is one of the most imaginative and compelling American songwriters working today. And this timeless track is not any exception to the very fine records she’s been rapidly producing the last few years.

I was lucky enough to see them around Brooklyn/manhattan several times in the Masterpiece era and a little thereafter, the first time with Alvvays and Ducktails at Prospect Park/Bandshell. For free! And I walked over to it! You suckers.

That’s well worth the thousands of dollars in monthly rent that all of us alternate suckers pay to live in this wonderful/hellish city… or, anyway, it’s some kind of compensation. And proof that some of the funds diverted away from the piss-soaked half burnt out subway go to things that aren’t entirely worthless.

Christ knows that Big Thief don’t need any more press. They’re the one band written about on this blog so far that your mom knows. But rightfully so, qualitatively.

The five tracks capable of preview for Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You are all solid and inventive, both in melody, construction and the usage of language. It seems like Masterpiece and Capacity came out 6 months ago and I am surely already dead / time moves quickly.


TRACK | The Mountain Goats – The Water Song

5/5 golden merles

John Darnielle has carved out a place in the world for himself through an exhaustive output of decades worth catchy and insightful pop music.

It is seemingly self-sustaining and I admire him a great deal for this achievement. As the gears about us churn and crush everyone else, John has managed not to be ground into a fine paste.

That is not at all to say that he didn’t have his fair share of hard times, from what I understand, those due all sentient beasts. But that he continued to create throughout them and continues to make interesting media. At some point most people stop.

This song is gleefully dire. There are some field recording elements for texture, subtle but sticky backing vocals in the chorus, and the bareness of John’s grating/glorious voice.

I am most familiar with this song in the context of a mix in which it feeds directly into Jeans Wilder’s Sparkler. And that will be posted next. Due to the way chronology works in archiving posts, it will be in order but now perceived out of order. The trick is that it doesn’t matter.

TRACK | Shana Cleveland – Face of the Sun

5/5 golden merles

La Luz’s Shana Cleveland made a tremendously good solo album, Night of the Worm Moon. And the favored track here is Face of the Sun.

“you stumbled right / into the blinding light”

The mix layers well the live elements (the occasional pulse and shriek of a hand shifting on the guitar string) and combines them expertly within the subsequent layered tracks (waves of backing vocals, piling and pulling the chorus apart).

The tones are complex and complimentary. The melody is direct and absorbing. It adds up to something of significance worth logging and celebrating in the void.

TRACK | Lean Year – Come and See

5/5 golden merles

It is within our capacity to build better worlds.

This is a song that encourages this practice, implores a reassessment of unjust hierarchies, and seems to reference one of the greatest films ever made, Elem Klimov’s Come and See.

“Fuck off, the old world.”

With a rich and subtle arrangement, Lean Year provide a good base for reinvention. Like Adam Curtis in Can’t get you out of my head: This entry is not the vision but a request for one.

The song is a precursor to the vision, but nonetheless a necessity, a rebuff, and a necessary bridge to what is coming. A good prompt and great entreaty.

TRACK | DVA – Javornicek

5/5 golden merles

Javornicek is a song…

“sung in a secret language… dedicated to the little kitten Javorníček, who was castaway with its spaceship by Nové Hrady. It spent one day with us, warming up, eating and then continuing its flight to its home planet.”

Are you not sold on this description? Maybe then you are on the wrong trash-rock blog.

It’s a lovely assemblage of field recorded loops and percussive detailing, gravel steps, the pluck of nested ukuleles. And it’s just about mixed better than anything i’ve ever heard.

TRACK | The Baptist Generals – Going Back Song

5/5 golden merles

There are two excellent renditions of this song on No Silver / No Gold. The other is a better single, but the version included below from the end of the album is preferred.

“Has anybody seen my bag / it’s the one I put together for the leaving”

This is what folk/americana could be and should be known as: all the layers of grit, complexity, simplicity, and directness. A unique and passionate delivery, playful and apocalyptic.

And just the one long note on the organ, putting Iggy to shame; making him out to be an overachieving opportunist for all those additional percussive hammerings.

TRACK | Amy Annelle – Miss it more than you know how

5/5 golden merles

Amy Annelle is a national treasure, albeit a Texas-based one so it’s a bit of a gray area.

In the alternate timeline in which Bernard Sanders has become the president, I imagine she is universally well regarded and heaped+drowning in praise.

But here we are in this rendition. The good still draws to it the good, but with slightly less gravity.

Regardless, The Cimarron Banks is a great album. The opening title track, the hellhound’s address, wounded man, forever in-between, and Miss it more than you know how, here featured, are all noteworthy achievements in songwriting and performance.

Annelle offers first-rate lyrical content interwoven with enduring melodies and an extremely technically accomplished delivery that is not stripped of character and nuance but rather plastered in them. It is difficult to ask for more than this.