Songwriting triumvirate Nathan Baumgartner, Boone Howard and Tyler Keene have returned with an album (Well Once There Was A King) of playful profundity, earnest strife, and drive-thru funerals. While melodically devoted, it is also again an anomaly among a landscape of folk and rock dominated with fashion, franchise, and anti-poetics.
“It feels too easy to forget/the lie I settle on”
Conceptually the album starts from a bizarre notion of songwriting: what if melody wasn’t a crutch for generalities but instead an enhancement to storytelling populated with keen or amusing observations? A novel conceit among those who generally shovel their shit my way. And, it must be said, a great relief.
“If I only had a mile to go/I’d find a place to lay my head/but I’m traveling on a road that never ends”
Sometimes you must subvert the song to accurately project the world back onto itself. Examples of that sort of happy mangling are many on the album: the muttered uttering of “…to love” in “Power City, USA, Part 2,” the muddied waters at the beginning of “A Road That Never Ends,” prompting and framing its sincerity, and the fractured request of “Please/don’t/worr/y” on “I’ve Lost Control of the Ending.” These are good ideas, well realized within the medium of a song.
The curvature of the carnival mirror realigns the source from out-sized to proper proportion, hymns carefully crafted to contort and bypass inherent biases. Some chances taken for me don’t land as solidly but that is the nature of experimentation, risk and reward. And the rewards greatly outweigh the blunders here. Plus it’s an expansive album; and as a living document, some sections may grow on you as others rot and wither over time.
It’s pay what you will on the bandcamp. Sending also with it Takashi Ito’s “The Moon.”
Plainly & Painfully 