“Come Ye & Follow Me“, newly released from Los Angeles Noise/Freak Folk outfit The Clog, is great and conspicuously graceful work. Within, acolytes suss out the true cost of devotion or defiance, a heralding flush with novel melodic elaborations and decaying poise.
Well beyond the depths of practical derision, the vocal components are constantly straining to subvert the anticipated cues, willfully shirking the numbers. Yet it is always running adjacent or parallel to precedent in a warm, familiar manner, lugged forward by the steady bass and drum.
Elegiac and expansive over the gently strummed guitar, the palette is ornately compiled. Each element — cymbal splash, shared & backing vocal, impaling synth, or lofty swell — donates yet another complimentary hook afforded to the careful arrangement.
“To show I’m worthy/And I shine bright
He said my ‘loyalty’s cheap and blind‘”
Nothing overstays, each phase in a haggardly but pleasing harmony. In the closing seconds the artifice unveils its era a bit as the choral scale shifts octaves methodically downward. A worthy denouement to such a careful thing.
Tribute without hagiography, influence without parody, all that good stuff. The piece has a lot of fun playing around with America’s long history of cult, revivalism, proselytization, and the perpetual promise of a newly reconfigured or rebranded providence. These precursors have been exclusively proven co-opted, commodified, corrupted. But here is another chapter, another effort, taking back the tools and setting them again to a process of apparently earnest yearning.
The vinyl is $20/the digital album $10 or the track $1 itself on the bandcamp. For another work built with great care, see the short “A Kind of Testament” directed by Stephen Vuillemin.
Plainly & Painfully 