Tag: Folk

TRACK | Grayson Hamm – Wasted Days

5/5 golden merles

Some nights I dream too loud.

“Wasted Days” is a particularly dreamy track concerning how one goes about parsing and processing time which is considered carelessly or poorly spent.

The production summons a form of much delicate weaving and luster. Concurrent piano and guitar drawl in subdued elaboration, insulating the reverie. Intricately overlaid, wending the way forward, each instrument aligns sequentially and percussively without tangling.

The central thesis of the song concerns the totality of experience: taking the good with the bad and recognizing them as two pieces of a greater, inextricable whole. That all happenings accumulate, the exact origins of influence are not known, and our choice of actions after the cumulative events can always contort fate to good.

It’s a lovely track full of treble and tremble, bearing much quiet resolve and confirmation of agency.

TRACK | Point No Point – Are you OK?

5/5 golden merles

In these dark times, alongside the great mass of voices demanding to be heard, pleading, there can sometime be a week or more in which I don’t hear anything I like. In these times I think maybe I should back away for a bit, that I’m not in an ideal mental space for processing new material. And that maybe I wouldn’t even know anything good if I heard it.

Then, sometimes, with great reassurance, comes, guided and meditative, a calm voice of distinction and craft. Point No Point’s “Are you OK?” is a tuning fork clanged against the side of the universe, spirited and uncommonly well calibrated.

It is that which is becoming, tangential and tactile, built before your very ears. It contains all the joys and horrors of being known. A tame trajectory, familiar, left unimpeded, that nevertheless hits the intended target. It sounds like the end while discussing the new beginning, which are coincidentally, mercifully, the same thing.

If there’s any future worth having our degraded/spoiled era will be bound up and bundled with the dark ages. But maybe some documents like this will make it out and convey we had a bit of sense and the capacity to craft things of value.

TRACK | Aoife Nessa Frances – Here in the Dark

5/5 golden merles

As a rule I don’t trust any song over 3 minutes. There are exceptions, many of them, but generally songwriters just don’t have that much to say on any given subject. Or at least not nearly as much as they think that they do… If I wanted to hear the chorus four times I’d loop the track.

But in this case, with Aoife Nessa France’s “Here in the Dark” running to 5:14, every second feels earned.

It works in concert with the void it fills, not so much against it. Minimal instrumentation is set to the task of accompanying the singer-songwriter substratum. Glacial and understated, spirals of synth and strings fittingly accent the core elements of voice and guitar.

The song/record has a different scope and pacing to most material in the genre, but without sacrificing some underlying mechanics or the appropriate measure of attention to detail. I don’t just mean BPM, there’s a kind of assurance to it. It doesn’t take the audience for granted but also does without pandering or indulging. There’s a recurring and really well realized construction.

TRACK | Happy Jawbone Family Band – fireflies make out of dust (take one)

5/5 golden merles

Sister project to Csehak’s The Lentils, Happy Jawbone Family Band is somehow differentiated, possibly meaningfully, possibly arbitrarily. There are some things man was not meant to know.

What is known is that it is good. What I like about this song is that it is immense, worrisomely so, and floating, but may have also been recorded anywhere that is partially submerged underwater.

It has various properties of shock and shiver in the guitar tones bounding off the snare. The dual vocals overlay and waver, and make a serrated cut for ease of accessing the heart of the track. That all comes together in a great and wondrous haze of waxy and metallic tones. Bigger than it has any right to be.

TRACK | Hovvdy – Easy

5/5 golden merles

The melody sprouts from the structure in Easy like a seedling through the roof of an abandoned weigh station. There is an ease and levity to the vocals amidst the weight of concrete piano and drum instrumentation. The collaboration of these elements across the soundscape provides us with an admirable expanse.

The spiraled knots in the melodic structure keep it familiar even as it extends to otherwise untenable lengths.

There is some very interesting techniques of pacing that might otherwise go unnoticed. That it is the work of two drummers seems to make a lot of sense. There are many kinds of ways to build a melody and embed it in memory and this one is both unique and lovely.

TRACK | The Rebel – I Found You Amongst the Roses

5/5 golden merles

I Found You Amongst The Roses is, wonderfully, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The traditional folk form, bounding, plodding forward, with the simple electronic drum pattern, and the calming melody: it is all cover for what is coming.

The usual line and truism about a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down is applicable. There is here a valuable expanding of what is agreeable within the window of initial expectations.

When the Prince lyrics enter, the subtle warping becomes stark. The track deconstructs itself, the tempo distends, ultimately ending in field recordings and samples that bring further context to the unease.

But it all works so well that those drawn in through tradition leave with a greater appreciation for experimentation, their conceptions of ‘good’ ever so slightly extended. And that is a valuable endeavor.

TRACK | Madison County Senior Citizen Center – Wasn’t That A Mystery

5/5 golden merles

This incredible track was recorded April 19, 1983, by Nancy Nusz as part of the documentation for the Florida Folklife Program. The chorus is composed of residents of the Madison County Senior Citizen Center, in Madison, Florida.

It is important that it was produced in the reign of President Bedtime for Bonzo. And it is a great relief presently to revisit it as something richer, collaborative and kind, and altogether more glorious, to contrast it to that morally delipidated, regressive political period that hangs heavily over us still. And still some more than others.

The choral progression builds, refined through collaboration and the variations of repetition. The choir behind the lead singer phases in and out, supporting and expanding the melody. One percussive clap accompanies the movement, through the emotional peak at the line “I never have seen my mother’s face,” and finally into the lovely field recorded context of a bit of laughter and banter at the outro.

TRACK | Twain – Nature Song

5/5 golden merles

“Look at those vultures fly, black against the sky, if they eat me I’ll learn how to fly.”

There must be a general reassessing.

the future is begging us to forfeit the values of tradition in the sake of the good, every day and at all times. To serve good and not habit, to form new rituals that reinforce behavior around decency and dignity.

There is embedded in this track a very faint accompanying backing vocals, chiming in at 5-10% and just adding a bit of nuance to the direct-to-handheld recorder operation. It is slightly staggered and suits the unfolding.

It feels like the future, approaching, slightly after and rising. “Go get ’em, little ones.”

TRACK | Chad Vangaalen – Hangman’s Son

5/5 golden merles

Chad Vangaalen is another one of them on the list of greatest living songwriters that I am aware of and can comprehend. Clinically Dead, Willow Tree, Molten Light, Hangman’s son, are all tracks I will hopefully feature in this pleasant void.

I think of the line “I wake up early in the afternoon, just so I can call ’em as I see ’em comin,” probably once every other day, and additionally at other random intervals, “the priest told the brothers that she could not be killed.”

Hangman’s Son is itself worthy of this treatment, of etching into the gray matter:

Oh, have mercy / on the demons that cursed me, baby.
Oh, Lay it on me / When my time has come /
and I don’t have the sense to run.

TRACK | Dana Gavanski – Catch

5/5 golden merles

Sometimes the world can be pushed forward a millimeter at a time and other times a yard. And it is not always possible to tell which we are engaged in while the action is taken or underway. Further, we are lucky if at any given moment we are able to tell which direction is forward.

But at least in this instance it is clear to me that this is a fine and good gesture toward something worthwhile.

And, similarly, it is both necessary and good to proceed in a manner which leaves a bridge for those we’ve left behind.

Gavanski’s “Yesterday is Gone” contains a lot of bridges forward. Catch, One by One, and Good Instead of Bad all have featured on a variety of mixes, and I am very much also looking forward to her output [[[going forward]]].