Edgy, Fun, Lyrically Driven Americana from A Brief View of the Hudson

New York Americana rock band A Brief View of the Hudson are influenced by traditional sounds but not intimidated by them. They’re not afraid to be themselves, which is a very good thing. They have punk sarcasm and energy and purist chops: their jaunty ragtime song is a warning to stay the hell away, and their carefree nocturne, complete with Paul Duffy’s organ elegantly handing off to a soulful Stefan Zeniuk tenor sax solo, is the prettiest song about death you’ll ever hear. Their lyrics have wit and bite; the arrangements are smart, tasteful and intriguing. The songs on their new album Querencia – streaming at their Bandcamp page – are catchy and deceptively simple: there are all kinds of neat touches that pop out at you with repeated listening. They’re playing Bowery Electric this Thursday May 9 at around 11; if roots music is your thing, you should go see them.

Guitarists Nick Nace and Ann Enzminger join voices in some rich harmonies fronting the band. Nace’s vocals have a wry, sardonic edge; Enzminger alternates between a country soul wail and a clipped precision in the same vein as Sarah Guild of the New Collisions. The opening track, Where Are Songs sets the tone, Duffy’s swirly, lush organ blending with Sean Boyd’s banjo, Nace’s guitar back in the mix, oscillating through a flange. Wisconsin Window Smasher – a tribute to the legendary Mary Sweeney – has a Sticky Fingers-era Stones vibe, a sound they return to with a vengeance a little later on in the savage working person’s lament No Way Out. Likewise, the harmony-fueled Song About Rocks builds to a growling backbeat rock tune: “Don’t stones cry?” Enzminger ponders.

The banjo waltz My Love Is in Washington DC banjo waltz reminds of Curtis Eller at his most sureal and creepy, Enzminger adding disarmingly high harmonies, “Where angels are bullets and death is a clown.” The intensity peaks out with the angst-driven Somewhere Else, another case where the lyrics contrast with a comforting, familiar, catchy tune, in this case Creedence-flavored rock. Jonnie Miles’ tiptoeing drums give Tilly a suspenseful edge, while Until the Waters Go shuffles along with lively horns and piano. There are also a couple of straight-up gospel numbers, the organ-spiced Angels (a remake of the old standard Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down) and the stripped-down country blues-infused Lay Me Down.

Hem Plays a Show to Get Lost In at Bowery Ballroom

Chauvinistic as this is to say, Hem always seem to play their best shows in New York. As frontwoman Sally Ellyson was quick to acknowledge Saturday night at Bowery Ballroom, it didn’t hurt that they had a full eight-piece contingent onstage including drummer Mark Brotter, pedal steel wizard Bob Hoffnar and violinist Heather Zimmerman along with keyboardist Dan Messe, guitarist/mandolinists Steve Curtis and Gary Maurer, bassist George Rush and guest Dawn Landes on backing vocals, glockenspiel and percussion. Midway through their current tour, they seemed happy (well, as happy as this band gets) to be back on their home turf and rewarded a hushed, adoring crowd with an almost thirty-song set that went on well past the two-hour mark.

Enchanting as Ellyson’s voice is on the band’s new album Departure & Farewell, she reminded that she’s even better live, transcending some hiccups in the Bowery’s usually reliable PA system during the first three songs. She sent a shout out to her Brooklyn homwtown with a poignant version of Tourniquet, Hoffnar lighting up Hotel Fire with a simmering steel solo as he would do on most of the other more country-flavored material. Reservoir built vividly to a soaring, harmony-drenched chorus out of Curtis’ nimble fingerpicking. Ellyson led the band into a plaintive, longing turnaround, reinventing Johnny Cash’s Jackson as early 60s noir.

Zimmerman’s edgy lines were a welcome presence, especially on bittersweet takes of The Seed and Strays, while Curtis fired off one of the night’s best solos on acoustic guitar on the “self-deprecatory love song” Stupid Mouth Shut. Ellyson and Messe teamed up for rapt, gorgeous duo versions of Traveler’s Song and Almost Home, while the whole band ramped up an epic art-rock intensity on the new album’s lush title track as well as the last of the encores, So Long. The night’s most intense moments came midway through, “the death segment,” as Ellyson called it: a brooding take of My Father’s Waltz, anonchalantly chilling version of Walking Past the Graveyard and then the murder ballad Carry Me Home, rooted in Messe’s gospel-infused piano. The high point of the night, appropriately enough, was Not California, its narrator ill at ease with the wave of clueless second-wave gentrifiers hot on her tail, foreshadowing total annihilation. The band also debuted We’ll Meet Along the Way, a new number – “our death metal song,” as Ellyson termed it – with the night’s most brooding, overtly menacing melody. Hem return to the road on June 1 at the Sinclair in Cambridge, Massachusetts before heading further south. Keep up with Hem’s archive.org channel to see if any enterprising soul had the presence of mind to record the show: if so, it’s a keeper.

Yet Another Smart, Purist Album from Kim Richey

Kim Richey is one of those songwriters that Americana music fans take for granted. Every so often she puts out a new album, and it always ends up being pretty much what you’d expect: smart, impeccably crafted, with tasteful playing, lots of catchy hooks, plenty of detail and wise observations in the lyrics. Her latest one Thorn in My Heart is her seventh in a career that began in the mid-90s. Back then she was ahead of her time, someone who didn’t come out of country music but found herself a home there, more or less. Since then she’s circled closer around that center, every now and then selling a song to some New Nashville type. The viability of that business model having plunged so dramatically has put Richey out on the road more consistently, not such a bad thing since nobody does her songs as well as she does. She’s playing Joe’s Pub tonight with her band at around 10:15; tickets are $15 and are still available as of now.

As usual, Richey has surrounded herself with a cast of quality Nashville sidemen: the core of her touring band, guitarist Neilson Hubbard and mandolinist/multi-instrumentalist Dan Mitchell plus guitarists Will Kimbrough and Kris Donegan, bassist Michael Rinne and drummer Evan Hutchings, along with Wilco’s Pat Sansone (formerly of Jenifer Jackson’s band) on keys and Trisha Yearwood guesting on harmony vocals. Richey likes to write with people: as with her previous album, Hubbard gets a lot of co-writes here.

The title track is a terse midtempo backbeat country ballad that wouldn’t be out of place in the Tift Merritt songbook. “I’m fighting a battle with the undertow, it’s hard to hold your hand when you’re letting go,” the narrator grouses. Something More sets a brooding southern gothic narrative against spiky banjo and Sansone’s surreal funeral-parlor organ. And No Means Yes is an oldschool country cheating song in waltz time.

Angels’ Share, a co-write with the 1861 Project’s Thomm Jutz, builds a slow, summery, crying-in-your-beer ambience up to a bittersweet organ break: Lucinda Williams comes to mind. Richey has a couple more collaborations with Jutz here: I’m Going Down, an escape anthem with more bristling banjo, gospel piano and a trip-hop beat, and Everything’s Gonna Be Good, a slow, cautiously optimistic gospel-tinged ballad.

By contrast, the album’s best song, Come On – co-written with Mike Henderson – brings back the escape imagery over snarling guitar-fueled garage rock riffage. The other Henderson collaboration, Take Me to the Other Side, is also a gem, working its way up from a doomed Appalachian country-gospel theme. I Will Wait (written with Henrik Irgens) is sort of Richey’s Long Black Veil.

London Town, co-written by ex-bandmate Nate Campany, is a trip-hop song in disguise with tasty, moody trumpet fills interspersed amidst the jangle. And Richey moves to harmony vocals on the catchy Americana rock anthem Breakway Speed, a BoDeans-flavored collaboration with Mando Saenz with a wry Johnny Cash quote as its centerpiece. On one hand, Richey isn’t breaking any new ground here; on the other hand, it’s hard to imagine anyone else who mines a pensive acoustic-electric Americana vein as subtly and consistently well as she does.

Purist, Rustic Americana from Vincent Cross

Songwriter Vincent Cross was a mainstay of the late, lamented Banjo Jim’s Americana music scene, but he’s hardly been idle since that club shut its doors. His previous album Home Away from Home was a pretty straight-up, purist bluegrass collection; his new one A Town Called Normal is a lot more eclectic, a mix of rustic acoustic Americana with a bit of folk-rock and traditional sounds from across the pond. Most of the album is streaming at various places, including Cross’ site and his myspace page. Cross sings with an unaffected, easygoing twang, plays guitars, mandolin and harmonica and has an excellent band behind him, incorporating the talents of various combinations of Bennett Sullivan and Doug Nicolaisen on banjos; Max Johnson, Allen Cohen and Larry Cook on bass; Mark Farrell on mandolin and Shane Kerwin on drums on a few tracks.

Several of the songs sound like they could be Appalachian standards…except that they’re originals. One of the richest sounding of these is Cursed, with its lusciously intermingled layers of banjo, mandolin and acoustic guitar. Cross has a way with aphoristic oldtime vernacular: “How can we distinguish the evil from the good? The chorus always should,” he observes on the title cut. Likewise, the metaphorically-charged cautionary tale Turn Your Eyes: “Warning bells from the mizzzen mast, don’t go down with the crew and cast.” And Childish Things – a catchy, swinging bluegrass-tinged original, not the James McMurtry hit – muses that “nobody knows why the caged bird sings til you put away your childish things.”

My Love starts out quietly and then builds to a neat series of tradeoffs between Cross’ harmonica and nimble guitar flatpicking. Old Christmas Wrapping, a bittersweet waltz, goes into down-and-out Tom Waits territory, but less pessimistically. Walking on the Outside sounds suspiciously like an acoustic version of Son Volt’s Tearstained Eye, with a soulful dobro solo. Sometimes builds up to a brooding, hypnotic two-chord jam, while Trouble Being There evokes Matt Keating with its wry surrealism and gentle folk-rock melody.

There’s also Footnotes, a brooding polyrhythmic miniature; Wrack and Ruin, which takes a stab at honkytonk; and a nicely syncopated take of the traditional folk song Cuckoo, “who never hollers ‘cuckoo’ til the 4th day of July.” How’s that for symbolism?  Cross is at the American Folk Art Museum on 4/26 at 5:30 PM.

Brilliant, Menacing Americana Rock from Mud Blood & Beer

Mud Blood & Beer were one of the best bands in NYC’s late, lamented Lakeside Lounge scene. They play what’s essentially an update on the 80s “paisley underground” sound that was rabidly popular on college radio, a darkly psychedelic, lyrically-driven blend of country twang, electric Neil Young rasp and Velvets stomp. They’ve got a new album, The Sweet Life just out and an album release show on April 13 at 8 PM at the Bitter End. The band has two first-rate songwriters and brilliant lead guitarists in Jon Glover and Jess Hoeffner, who share share an edgy, restless unease. Anger, danger and black humor pervade this album. They make a good team, Glover playing menacing southwestern gothic Steve Wynn to Hoeffner’s somewhat more eclectic, straight-up rocking Dan Stuart. With layer after layer of jangle, clang and roar, guitars and vocals up front, Stephen Swalsky’s bass and Stephen Sperber’s drums up just enough to keep everything rolling, the album’s sonics are better than most vinyl records made these days. Count this as one of the best of 2013 by a mile.

Glover’s Nasturtiums opens the album and sets the tone, a grimly bitter, minor-key, backbeat-driven desert rock anthem that builds to a savage guitar solo, like the Dream Syndicate’s Karl Precoda in especially focused mode. “Silence like an echo from a tomb…for forty days I wandered in the wilderness, returned to find nasturtiums in bloom,” Glove intones. Lost, by Hoeffner is a briskly catchy tune that evokes 80s legends True West, gleaming new wave blended with  luscious layers of Americana guitars. Another Hoeffner tune, You Wanted to Be Misunderstood, evokes the Long Ryders with its galloping, electrified bluegrass vibe and an all-too-brief, blistering Glover solo.

A couple of Glover tunes come next. Little Black Heart takes a spiraling hook that Tobin Sprout could have written and sets it to snarling, twangy rock, totally late-period Dream Syndicate, a band these guys evoke even more savagely on the slow, creepy Corner of His Eye. Hoeffner’s smoldering fuzztone ambience and then a feral, jagged solo highlight this sinister tale of dirty dealing and its potential consequences.

Matches & Gasoline – a Hoeffner number- evokes a steady Green on Red feel, followed by Glover’s snarling title track, which with its offhandedly brutal, bluesy solo wouldn’t be out of place on the Dream Syndicate’s classic Medicine Show album. Hoeffner’s See the Light could be an early True West song, while Glover’s briskly shuffling Be Still amps up the rocking Bakersfield country vibe.

One of Those Days – another Glover tune – returns to a savage Steve Wynn/Neil Young ambience with its menacing midtempo sway, cruel minor-key bridge and dismissive lyrics. Tell Me I’m Wrong, by Hoeffner, could be the Replacements, while Break Your Heart, with its shivery vibroslap sonics, is the most psychedelic track here. The album closes with Testimony, a murder ballad, opening with a tongue-in-cheek ELO reference and snaking its way through a series of increasingly agitated Glover solos to its doomed ending. More bands should be making music like this. In addition to this album, Mud Blood & Beer has their 2009 debut and also the album by Hoeffner’s side project Crooked Highway available as free downloads.

Jeanne Jolly: Eclectic Vocals, Intriguing Stories, Great Band

Raleigh, North Carolina country singer Jeanne Jolly’s latest album Angels has a lot of great tunes and great stories. Jolly is conservatory trained, with a jazz background: she had a money gig singing in a well-known pop-jazz band for awhile. In the last couple of years, she’s honed her chops on her home turf, embracing the country styles she grew up with there. Much as the album blends oldschool country with rock, it’s a million miles from New Nashville. Although Jolly’s voice can give you goosebumps, she saves the pyrotechnics for when she really wants to nail a lyric or drive a chorus home. Her songs usually follow a narrative: she’s got an eye for detail, likes to work the suspense for all it’s worth, and her band is sensational. She’s at the big room at the Rockwood on March 1 at 7 PM with eight-string guitarist Chris Boerner and drummer/keyboardist Nick Baglio.

Angels on Hayworth Street, the album’s opening track, sets the tone. Over Boerner’s tersely bluesy electric guitar and Allyn Love’s deliciously keening pedal steel, Jolly sings about a woman who “Found out on a Sunday with a pale face and racing heart” who knew she had to leave. As the narrative goes on and she finds unexpected comfort, it’s not clear if she’s actually escaped, or died and gone off to a better place. Likewise, the propulsive, crescendoing Happy Days Cafe, lit up with James Wallace’ jaunty, rippling piano, could be about a heartwaming encounter with a stranger…or a chance meeting with a ghost who can’t let go of what haunts him.

The rest of the album is impressively eclectic. Sweet Love, a balmy, shuffling bossa-tinged acoustic trip-hop number, reminds of Bob Marley. The Hard Way is a honkytonk song done as backbeat rock with a wild, snarling Boerner guitar solo, while the bitter, aphoristic Tear Soup is the most traditional C&W number here, complete with a spine-tingling blue yodel or three and more than a hint of operatics in the vocals as it winds out.

The anxious road song Long Way Home evokes another first-class Americana chanteuse, Mary Lee Kortes, right down to the catchy chorus and the crystalline vocals. The album’s strongest and hardest-hitting song, Round and Round Again, begins as a gentle waltz, a fond look back at young love and then explodes: “I’ll walk by you, as the sky splits in two,” Jolly wails in anguish on the chorus. The album ends with The Kiss, which sounds like Bjork doing Betty Carter, Jolly’s torchy vocals over an ambient drone and Mat Caughan’s muffled percussion, followed by the country waltz Good Man. This is an ambitious album: Jolly covers an awful lot of ground here, keeps her bearings and when she pulls out all the stops, it can be breathtaking.

Elegantly Pensive, Purist Americana Songwriting from Susan James

Concept album about a breakup: what springs to mind? Cliche after cliche from some self-absorbed singer-songwriter? Cheesy, weepy lyrics and wimpy acoustic guitars? Something you’d most likely click off in a nanosecond? In that case, it might be dangerous to let you know that Susan James‘ new album Driving Toward the Sun is a concept album about a nasty breakup. Then again, an element of danger, emotional or otherwise, is a frequent presence in James’ music. If depth and intensity and a lush mix of both oldschool and alt-country and elegant chamber pop are your thing, there’s plenty of all that here. The whole album is streaming at James’ Bandcamp page.

The title pretty much says it all: it cuts any way you might imagine, and it gives you a clear indication of how smartly James writes and sings. Her imagery is plainspoken but potent, her clear, uncluttered, direct voice unselfconsciously affecting. James hails from Los Angeles, and there are a ton of musicians backing her. Notable among them are brilliant, ubiquitous pedal steel player Eric Heywood, purist drummer and Amy Allison collaborator Don Heffington and guitarist Neal Casal, whose terse, bitingly incisive leads cut through the lush bed of acoustic rhythm and soaring steel lines, usually over a steady, resolute backbeat. James’ songs evoke both the pensive Americana purism of Tift Merrritt as well as the clarity and edgy, confrontational directness of Penelope Houston. Tom Petty producer Ryan Ulyate deserves a shout-out as well for fleshing out these songs with a rich mix of textures without falling back on any easy 70s pop or 21st century corporate cliches: it sounds like the record he always wanted to make if left to his own devices.

The pensive title track has a Merritt-like determination in the face of adversity: the way Heywood’s floating steel contrasts with Jason Chesney’s anxious bass solo as it kicks off the final chorus is a characteristically smart, subtle touch. Wandering, a brisk, bluegrass-tinged shuffle is more optimistic: James’ protagonist has a “compass for a heart and a pickaxe mind” and isn’t about to let anybody get in the way.

Aqua Dulce Tears is sort of a schlock-free take on what Linda Ronstadt was doing in the 70s, Casal’s terse, echoey leads foreshadowing James’ chronicle of disappointment and dissolution. Just from the title, you know where U-Haul in the Driveway is going, but it’s bittersweet rather than maudlin, gorgeously flavored with Heywood’s low, moody swells, mandolin and a clave backbeat.

Despite all the pain, all the miscommunication, James is not ready to pack it in: “Any fool can see, I’ll be here come next anniversary,” she intones quietly on the next track: “I wanna scream and shout…quiet, the kids are in the room.” The slow, jangly ballad House of Love has both the tersely poetic sensibility and catchiness of Mary Lee Kortes‘ recent work, not to mention James’ nonchalantly chilling vocals. John McDuffie’s neat twelve-string guitar break toward the end sheds a little light that you just know is going to disappear, and it does.

The closest thing here to Penelepe Houston is Tule Fog, especially as the wickedly catchy, metaphorically-charged chorus kicks in: “When the the Tule fog comes rolling in, it’s a dangerous road my friend, when you can’t see around you…”  The album ends with Mission Bells, up with a spash of cymbals, twin acoustic guitars, a wash of pedal steel in the background. It’s both a requiem for lost hopes as well as a tentative stab in an opposite direction: the Eagles only wish they had material like this to use to connect with a current-day audience. This is the rare album that will resonate with people who are looking for substance and depth as well as listeners who will never hear this as anything more than something pleasant in the background.

Ambrosia Parsley Continues Her Noir Comeback

Singer Ambrosia Parsley got off to a pop-oriented start with Shivaree, best known for the noir pop hit Goodnight Moon from an early zeros Tarantino soundtrack. But her most memorable work to date has been for Air America, the network that braved the airwaves as a sane counterpart to wingnut radio during the mid to late part of the past decade. Much as Parsley’s acerbic, Phil Ochs-ish takes on the news of the day won her a wide audience back in 2004, she has not been idle since, with a new album in the works and an ep, I Miss You, I Do, to show for it in the meantime. She’s playing the big room at Rockwood tonight, 1/28 at 7:15 PM with some pals from her radio days including similarly politically-fueled comedienne Lizz Winstead and others; advance tix are $12 and available at the big room. Intriguing ambient/indie classical composer/violinist Christina Courtin follows afterward at 9:30 PM.

The ep bridges the gap between synthily textured indie rock and a more melodic, retro noir style. It opens with The Other Side, woozy vintage synth on the intro, a backbeat and an echoey wall of resonant guitars. There’s a bit of a Dolly Parton lilt in Parsley’s voice – undernearth all the rock trappings, this is a country song. Parsley follows that with Whispering Pines, a slow piano ballad with low, watery synth organ, sort of an update on creepy, Lynchian Julee Cruise pop.

Nighttime, with its ethereal acoustic guitar hook and gentle guy/girl vox, works a hypnotic post-Wilco Americana-pop vein that contrasts with the restlessness of the lyrics. Losing the Holiday slowly works a growling, guitar-fueled Americana rock vamp with twinkling electric keys overhead. The final track is The Answer (Tim & Becky’s Wedding, the most Lynchian cut here, an atmospheric take on wistful, angst-fueled Orbison pop. Imagine Dennis  Hopper gasping “Candy-colored clown!” to this helps fill out the picture.

Tift Merritt’s Traveling Alone: Her Best Album

Tift Merritt’s Traveling Alone is THE lead guitar album of 2012. She’s probably one of the least likely people you might expect to be behind something like this. But she deserves it. As somebody who first hit about ten years ago, in the dying hours of the radio-and-records era (she’s on Yep Roc at the moment: tomorrow, who knows) she’s had to shift gears to make a living on the road. And she’s done it: that’s where she is right now, on US tour. Good songwriters always have their choice of good musicians, but the band on this album is monstrous. Marc Ribot and pedal steel virtuoso Eric Heywood team up for some of the most gorgeous interplay on any rock or country record in recent memory, alongside multi-instrumentalist and Laurie Anderson collaborator Rob Burger plus Merritt’s longtime bassist Jay Brown and Calexico’s John Convertino on drums. Producer Tucker Martine finally got a real band to work with – as opposed to the meh-ness of the Decemberists et al. – and obviously had a blast with all the multi-tracking. Songs typically start out spare, even skeletal, but quickly build to a rich, lush thicket of guitars firing at you every which way.

And yet, Merritt’s nuanced voice is still front and center, often trailing down suspensefully at the end of a phrase to draw the listener even closer. She’s lived up to the comparisons ever since people started calling her the new Linda Thompson. The songs here follow a trail of existential angst, a wistfully knowing solitude: Merritt has never written better, or had so much command of a turn of phrase as she does here. For those who like the idea of Lucinda Williams but find the real thing overrated, this is for you.

There’s a romantic side to being alone, and Merritt is no stranger to that. The theme permeates much of the album, beginning with the title track, where she admits to enjoying it, stress and all. This one has Richard and Linda Thompson all over it, Ribot adding sweet tremolo and then a fiery, distorted solo. Sweet Spot radiates longing but not desperation: it’s Williams without the drunken rasp, over a lush bed of steel and tremolo guitar, Ribot taking it to Memphis with his solo. They go deeper into soul with Drifted Apart, Merritt going for Laura Cantrell-ish understatement [memo to self - who is that guy on the faux-Orbison high harmonies? Aaron Neville?]. Still Not Home grafts a slapdash My Sharona riff onto a brisk, anxious country shuffle, Merritt nailing the tense exhilaration as she makes her way out: “All the windows open and the wind and the wheels, nobody can tell me the way that feels.”

The band goes for a slow, hypnotic, bucolic early evening ambience on Feeling of Beauty, Berger’s piano blending with the steel and the web of acoustic guitars: “I’m all right, thanks for asking/Got a few hopes in my basket,” Merritt sings, misty and sultry. Too Soon to Go, a noir countypolitan tune, is just plain gorgeous with its richly intertwining guitar leads, building to an elegant conversation between Ribot and Heywood. Small Talk Relations is arguably the most intense song here, a towering piano anthem that rises from almost skeletal to lushly orchestrated. Merritt matter-of-factly develops her metaphors to a big crescendo:

Workmen in the street below
Softly play the radio
The crowd just turns to leave
A secret current underneath
Cannot be heard above the din below

A plaintive Appalachian ballad fired up with reverb guitar, steel and Rhodes piano, Spring is a defiant defense of living at the edge, existentially speaking. “Only for a minute just to be alive, before I hit the ground just below the spine,” Merritt intones bittersweetly as the song takes flight, up to a viscerally searing Heywood solo: it’s the high point of the album. Ribot’s slashing, bluesy solo out is pretty adrenalizing too.

The next couple of tracks take a surprisingly effective detour into 80s-flavored pop. The first one, To Myself, wears a backbeat country disguise: you want to hate this, but the hook is just plain irresistible. Likewise, In the Way is the Cure, 1986, with the deluxe Americana package: jauntily pulsing ragtime piano, lusciously watery layers of vintage chorus-box guitar and an artful multitracked solo. The closing cut, Marks, a towering breakup ballad, builds slowly to a fiery tangle of guitars, snarling, resonating and jangling as Merritt reaches for the metaphor in the pocket of her winter coat. Albums like this are hard to write about because it’s impossible to resist the temptation to replay the songs – and then they become distractions. Hopefully this is sufficient inspiration for you to investigate it.

Tom Shaner’s Long-Overdue Solo Debut: Worth the Wait

For those who’ve followed Tom Shaner’s career since his days in the early zeros fronting Industrial Tepee – the great southwestern gothic rock band that should have been as famous as Calexico or Giant Sand but never was – his new album Ghost Songs, Waltzes and Rock n Roll is long overdue. Ironically, though billed to Shaner solo, it’s far more lush and richly arranged than anything he did with that band, in fact, the best thing he’s ever done. The music blends layers of jangly, twangy, spiky, occasionally searing electric and acoustic guitars over a nimble rhythm section, ornamented with deviously flickering keyboards, mandolin, banjo and the occasional wry electronic effect. Songwise, there are echoes of Steve Wynn, the Byrds, Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave in its most pensive moments.

Shaner’s nonchalant, laid-back vocals are sort of a cross between Lou Reed and the Wallflowers’ Jakob Dylan. The songs’ lyrics are terse, cynical and clever: they’ll resonate especially with anyone who’s weathered the same storms as Shaner has during these past few years as the New York he came up in slid closer and closer to New Jersey. Although many of the songs have a dusky desert feel, a familiar urban milieu recurs throughout the album. That factors in heavily on the funniest song here, the deadpan, early Elvis Costello-ish Unstoppable Hipster, as well as the considerably more spare, haunting Downtown Has Done Damage, which reminds of the Church around 1986 or so.

Sinner’s Highway sets a surreal, sordidly Lynchian scene to snarling minor-key rock: a late-period Industrial Tepee tune, it reminds a lot of Steve Wynn, with a wry quote in the solo guitar outro. Another one from that era, Sister Satellite manages to be dreamy yet bracing as its layers of guitar mingle and then surge.Then Shaner evokes another well-known late 90s/early zeros band, White Hassle, with Forever Drug, spiced with tongue-in-cheek samples and hip-hop turntablism.

She Will Shine is crushingly caustic: over punchy, syncopated, Jayhawks-flavored rock, Shaner relates how a girl who couldn’t hack it in the big city is ostensibly leaving for better things in the country, but “when the lid is lifted, everything is shifted…her time is complete, the future is a one-way street.” Rosa Lee, a big concert favorite, works a more pensive, regretful vein.

Shaner pairs Foreverland, a creepy reggae song, with the nebulous, only slightly less creepy psych-folk anthem Silent Parade. Where Grief Becomes Grace, an echoey desert rock dirge, is as broodingly evocative as anything Giant Sand ever did. A cover of Tom Waits’ Cold Water picks up the pace with a gospel-fueled menace, black humor in full effect.

Only slightly less dark colors close the album. Everything Is Silver returns to a romping Elvis Costello vibe: it’s the opposite of what it seems. And My House is Green builds a moody acoustic Velvets ambience. But not everything here is as dark: there’s Sun Girl #2, with its lushly gentle Sunday Morning sway, and Streets of Galway, a lively Irish tune. One of the best albums of 2012, no question. Shaner plays the release show – assuming the subways are back up and running – at the Knitting Factory on Nov 7 at 8:30 PM.