Surprise Surprise
You wouldn’t expect surprises from Rawlings and Welch, their
musical partnership so long and distinctly established. Even the album cover
picture in black and white seems to represent rooted longevity – their place in
history recorded in a time-warp frontier pose, the two prominent members of the
Dave Rawlings Machine seated in their superior status and flanked by two others
standing, each a hand on the chair to their sides, protectively/reverentially.
But there are surprises. The sweeping and at times saccharine
strings on the opening two tracks are unexpected. First The Weekend is, in addition to its title, very much a Neil Young
sound – apart from those strings. Rawlings’ voice is at the lead, and it is a
drawl that talks to us casually from the open front door, chatty and expansive,
and when Welch adds her harmony vocal there is the familiar tight sweetness,
and Rawlings adds his signature guitar pickings, working through complex notes.
Next Short Haired Woman Blues has a
stepped acoustic guitar riff that rises and falls, a laconic cowboy-blues,
until the strings sweep in again on a much broader wave. It is, actually,
strange. Not Bacharach, but it is pop-60s, and they eventually pick up and
follow the guitar riff before swelling out again orchestrally.
Third The Trip is
what we do expect, an eleven minute narrative, this time employing a single
fiddle played by Brittany Haas. So take a
trip wherever your conscience says to roam; it’s much too much to try and live
a lie at home is the increasingly beautiful chorus to this song, each time
the harmony of its delivery heightening the maxim, and it is as if this beauty posits
an effect like that of the literary theory that such perfection in expression usurps
the otherwise darkness of the context/content, for the storytelling does seem
to lay out the competing reality of a life lived in ordinariness or much worse, or very
little of elevating experience [there's the poles of a body and a handkerchief and a hatchet and an unspeakable crime as well as the way banjos ring, chickens squall and little babies crow]. It is a hypnotic song that arouses those mixed
feelings with increasing intensity after repeated listens.
There’s sweet surprise in the falsetto singing from Rawlings
on Bodysnatchers, and more references
to chickens in the bluegrass of The Last Pharaoh. There’s something sticky on
the floor, is it Candy? is the not-so-existential question in Candy, a song that has been played live
by the band for a while; and the final song Pilgrim
[You Can’t Go Home], reminds of The Old Crow Medicine Show, not surprising
with Rawlings’ involvement in that band, and co-founder of Old Crow, Willie
Watson, playing on this album.
Is it, for all of this, a good album? You bet your darn chickens it is.
No comments:
Post a Comment