Vocal rich country-rock from Austin quartet

Group harmonies are returning to country music, and they’re just as pleasing today as they were in the 1970s. You can feel the joy they bring to Stonehoney as they vocalize the wordless “oh-ahhh” exclamations on the opening track. They revel in the way their voices blend with one another’s, and then collectively with the songs’ emotion. It suggests what CS&N must have felt the night they first harmonized. What really makes this Austin quartet’s debut special is that it was recorded live, with no sweetening and no overdubs. The synergy of voices, instruments and songs honed on stage followed the group into the studio, giving these fourteen songs (culled from forty cut in two days!) a wonderfully organic feel. As vocalist/guitarist Nick Randolph writes on their website, “The band grew out of us just hanging out, and it still has that same feeling.”

All four members credit their vocals first, their instruments second, and they reconfigure the lead/harmony assignments from song to song. All four contribute original songs, as well, and the results lean on a variety of country, country-rock and southern-rock influences. The opening line of “I Don’t Want to Go Home” might fool you into thinking it’s sung by John Fogerty, but by the time the song gets to its cleverly crafted lyric “now that you’re gone, the house is like a heartache with a view,” the vocal blend has the richness of Alabama. The lead vocal of the road-warrior themed “White Knuckle Wind” has the earthy edge of Levon Helm, with twangy guitars and Earle Pool Ball’s piano adding honky-tonk sparks.

The foursome find several ways to express longing for departed mates, writing alternately as the one leaving and the one being left. There’s understanding rather than angst in the remains of these relationships, with sadness filling up the spaces where bitterness might have grown. When the relationships succeed, such as in “Lucky One,” they’re proclaimed with open-throated joy, and in “There is Light” there’s optimism at the end of a dark emotional tunnel. The album’s one resolutely downbeat track is Shawn Davis’ letter from jail, “Good as Gone,” filled with somber reflections whose regret can’t turn back the clock on bad decisions. With four talented singer-songwriters, Stonehoney offers many different looks, but it’s their power as a group that’s truly arresting, and given the strength of these live-in-the-studio performances, they’re sure to be a killer stage act. [©2010 hyperbolium dot com]

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Bouncy combination of 70s Britpop, country-rock and sunshine psych

Named after one Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks’ songs from the mystique-laden Smile project, this Oregon quintet’s harmonies certainly nod to the brothers Wilson. And despite the Pet Sounds-styled bridge “Instrumental No. 2.,” the group artfully melds too many flavors, including  pop, glam, psych, blue-eyed funk, West Coast country-rock, and even swingy jazz, to call out the Beach Boys as a singular influence. The mix is more upbeat and retro than 2005’s Comes Back to You, motoring along with the summery smile of “Thought/Start” and drifting into space with the South-of-the-Border horn instrumental “Ruby’s Moon Elevator.” The song list artfully mates the hooks of AM singles with the finely crafted segues of FM albums. The band’s mix of British pop (T Rex, Thunderclap Newman, Badfinger, post-Beatles Paul McCartney), country-rock (Byrds, Burrito Brothers, CS&N, Creedence Clearwater Revival) and sunshine psych (Beach Boys, Millennium, Sagittarius) is sure to perk up a cloudy day, whether or not you’re from Portland. [©2010 hyperbolium dot com]

Listen to Naked Friends
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Vintage live document of West Coast country-rock pioneers

The West Coast country-rock band Poco was known early on for their live shows. Their third album, a live set titled Deliverin’, was recorded in late-1970 and cracked the Top 30 – something their two previous albums had failed to do. Epic set up a private showcase in Columbia’s Hollywood studio, having the band play in an intimate setting for an audience of label employees. With the group’s latest studio album, From the Inside, having just hit the streets, this set was a rally for the employees, a warm-up for supporting gigs, and an opportunity to lock down the set and solidify the latest band line-up. By this point, Jim Messina had been replaced by guitarist/singer Paul Cotton, joining another recent addition, Timothy B. Schmit, and founding members Richie Furay and Rusty Young.

Unlike the new material debuted on Deliverin’, this hour-long set cherry-picked material from all four of the band’s previous albums, with half drawn from their latest studio release. The medley of “Hard Luck,” “Child’s Claim to Fame,” and “Pickin’ Up the Pieces” had appeared on their previous live outing, and remains notable for the inclusion of Furray’s Buffalo Springfield-era “Child’s Claim to Fame.” The live arrangements were generally kept concise and tight, though they allowed themselves to jam a bit on “Hurry Up,” and the single “C’mon” is stretched to five minutes with a breakdown and guitar solo. They also slow down mid-set for a pair of acoustic tunes, “You Are the One” and “Bad Weather.”

Cotton’s role as lead guitarist and singer gave this line-up an edgier sound than the founding quintet. Young’s pedal steel is still prominently featured on songs like “Ol’ Forgiver” and “Bad Weather,” and the band sings fine country-rock harmonies, but the electric guitars cut a bit deeper, and there are some progressive elements in the melodies and vocal arrangements – particularly in the newer material. Furay would leave the band a couple of years later, making this the only officially released document of this line-up’s live prowess. Collectors’ Choice digipack includes a four-panel booklet with detailed (but unsigned) liner notes; this is one of four previously unreleased live albums the label is releasing concurrently. [©2010 hyperbolium dot com]

Throwback California country-rock

This Los Angeles country-rock group’s anthology re-imagines Big Star’s hopeful album title #1 Record as a joshing (or perhaps wishful) look back through a catalog that wasn’t really likely to find broad commercial fortune. A decade in the making – the band formed in 2000 – the songs cherry-pick the group’s four previous releases, adding an early demo, two previously unreleased tracks, and three new recordings. The band’s combination of tight country harmonies, shuffling rhythms, road-inspired topics, and flights of fiction mark them as natural-born citizens of Gram Parson’s cosmic American music colony. Their music offers reverence for the twang upon which it’s built, but there’s also humor, tongue-in-cheek paranoia and a liberal hippie environmental ethos running through their songs.

Coming together at the tail end of the Clinton administration and flourishing artistically during eight years of Bush, the band’s songwriters found plenty of grist for the lyrical social mill. They sing the praises of “Byrd from West Virginia,”  note his past membership in the Ku Klux Klan, and highlight his anti-war stance with a guitar, bass and mandolin waltz the fiddle-playing senior senator [1 2] would surely appreciate. There are songs of flower-child philosophy being passed to a new generation, pot farmers living off the gifts of “Humboldt,” meditative appreciations of the America’s open road beauty, sun-burnt runs through the desert, tears cried for the planet’s desecration (or as they label it “one sad valentine to Earth”), and ire leveled at capitalistic icons such as salesmen and self-help charlatans.

The group seems to have picked from their catalog a group of tunes that are more about people than between them. They lean towards first person articulation, songs sung to an absent ‘you’ and songs sung at the listener. Even the separation of “Up the Grapevine” is more an interior monologue than a conversation. Their namesake tune calls to like thinkers, “if you see hawks / then maybe we should talk,” seeking to gather rather than having kindred souls on hand. The protagonists aren’t isolated, exactly, but neither do they seem as connected to others as the band is musically connected to one another. “Bossier City” provides a few minutes of explicit intercourse as Rob Waller trades verses and harmonizes with Carla Olson. Waller’s duet with Carla Olsen on the newly waxed “Bossier City” breaks through that wall. Fans of the Flying Burrito Brothers, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Crazy Horse, Dave Alvin and the Gosdin Brothers should check this out! [©2010 hyperbolium dot com]

MP3 | Humboldt
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Carolinian country-rocker transplanted to California

Mark Lennon is a North Carolina native whose southern roots can be heard in the bluegrass-inflected harmonies of this third release. His adopted Los Angeles has also made an impact on Lennon’s music in the airiness of his melodies and the sunshine of the guitar strumming. His music brings to mind the folk- and country-rock sounds of early ‘70s Golden State transplants like Brewer & Shipley, but also acts like the Amazing Rhythm Aces, Ozark Mountain Daredevils and Grateful Dead. You can also hear the flowing road rhythms of the Allman Brothers in the piano and guitar jam of “What I Could Be With You.” Lennon’s voice bears a strong resemblance to Ryan Adams’; he conjures a modern balance of instruments on the superb “Wildside” by adding horns to piano and acoustic guitar for a duet with Simone Stevens. Lennon has been in California for seven years, but he still considers himself a Southerner, offering up the lovelorn letter of homesickness, “Tennessee.” At twenty-eight minutes this is halfway between EP and album, but all eight songs are solid, so really all you’re missing are the four album tracks that don’t always measure up. [©2009 hyperbolium dot com]

MP3 | Down the Mountain
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Scott McCaughey indulges his Ray Davies jones

After the Beatle-esque pop of 2007’s The Minus 5, this Scott McCaughey-led collective returns with a new lineup and a twangier country-rock sound. McCaughey and companion Peter Buck are back, alongside Colin Meloy, additional members of the Decemberists and other guests. As on all of the collective’s albums, McCaughey’s vocals and songs provide the binding component, the latter of which include a healthy dose of downbeat, troubled and troubling themes. Pedal steel, banjo and general melancholy make a straightforward match to the lyrical tenor, with McCaughey sounding remarkably like Ray Davies in his mid-period Kinks prime – in both nasal vocal tone and social content.

The album opens with the bitter remains of a failed courtship and closes with the despondent misery of a troubled and broke bar fly. In between McCaughey offers the sort of opaque lyrics he’s written regularly for both the Minus Five and the Young Fresh Fellows. His titles and lyrics intimate deeper personal meanings, but they’re not always easily revealed. He resurfaces for a portrait of the working musician’s nightmare, “The Lurking Barrister,” he eyes unsparing isolation and social decay in “Big Beat Up Moon” and excoriates fundamentalism with “I Would Rather Sacrifice You.” The Kinks vibe is strong on “Vintage Violet,” with the She Bee Gees singing along as a girl-group Greek chorus.

McCaughey’s used the ever-shifting membership of the Minus Five to give each of the “band’s” releases a distinct flavor. In contrast, the parallel release by the Young Fresh Fellows, I Think This Is, has to work to recapture the group’s vibe. McCaughey’s jokey, ironic and sometimes startlingly penetrating songs support both bands, but the free hand of perpetual reinvention gives an edge to the Minus Five. Without having to hit a specific musical or emotional tone, the Minus Five indulges whatever is currently running around McCaughey’s head. This year it seems to be (among other things) Muswell Hillbillies. [©2009 hyperbolium dot com]

MP3 | The Long Hall
The Minus 5’s MySpace Page

Versatile mix of folk, country, country-rock, soul and hot-jazz

It’s hard to pinpoint this Los Angeles quintet, as they range through acoustic folk, country, horn-tinged soul, and hot jazz. If you had to pick one to represent the bulk of the group’s second album, it’d be country (or country-rock or Americana), but there are whole tracks that take you somewhere else before returning you to two-steps, waltzes, twanging guitars, bass and drums. Leslie Stevens’ singing brings to mind the high voices of folksinger Joan Baez, Americana vocalist Julie Miller and country star Deana Carter. But Stevens sings with more of a lilt than Baez, less girlishness than Miller, and when the group ventures to country-rock, it’s without Carter’s southern ‘70s overtones.

The finger-picked guitar and songbird vocal that open “Los Angeles” spell stool-perched, singer-songwriter folk, but harmonium and choral harmonies thicken the song into a hymnal. Stevens’ high notes fit equally well into Lucinda Williams-styled Americana, cutting through the twangy low strings and baritone guitar, and pushed along by driving bass and drums. The Badgers’ range is impressive, tumbling along to a “Gentle on My Mind” shuffle, hotting things up with tight jazz licks, adding soul with Stax-styled horns, and laying down waltzing fiddle ballads, country-rock and the spooky “If I Was Linen.” The latter’s off-kilter piano and musical saw spookily echo the main theme of The Elephant Man.

Stevens’ sings country songs spanning the relationship lifecycle of blossom, maturity, lethargy and dissolution. The first is powerfully drawn by the budding relationship of “Old Timers,” rooted in tangible images of childhood’s emotional urgency. The latter provides a grey coat to the loneliness of Ben Reddell’s “Winter Fugue.” In between are irresistible romantic smoothies, longed-for and abandoned lovers, and finally realized kiss-offs. The full cycle comes together in the physical and mental escape of “Salvation,” with Stevens realizing “when I pull off the road / to get a better view / now I can see the start of us / and the end to me and you.”

The classically-tinged “What Fall Promised” sounds like a good outtake from Sam Phillip’s Martinis and Bikinis, and the closing “It’s Okay to Trip” provides sing-along old-timey country-blues. One might complain that the Badgers can’t quite decide what kind of music they want to play, as they’re capable of a range of sounds rooted in country, rock and folk without staying shackled to any one. The variety’s laudable, but it leaves it to Stevens’ conviction and vulnerable warble to provide an emotional through-line to the album. [©2009 hyperbolium dot com]

MP3 | Los Angeles
Leslie and the Badgers MySpace Page

California country-rock pioneer’s mid-70s solo LPs

Given Darrow’s musical pedigree, it’s a wonder his name and these two early-70s solo albums aren’t better known. In the 1960s he put together the California bluegrass group, Dry City Scat Band, was a founding member of the eclectic psychedelic band Kaleidoscope, spent a few years in the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, toured behind Linda Ronstadt and did studio work for James Taylor, John Fahey, Leonard Cohen and others. In the early ‘70s he signed with United Artists and recorded this pair of albums, the self-titled Chris Darrow in 1973 and Under My Own Disguise the following year. The latter was previously reissued on CD on the Taxim label, and the pair was previously issued as a two-fer by BGO. This deluxe reissue is remastered from scratch, offering each album on individual CDs and on individual 180-gram vinyl LPs, all housed in gatefold covers and sporting a 48-page 12” x 12” photo and liner note book.

Chris Darrow models itself after the breadth of Kaleidoscope, but without the overt psychedelia. Darrow’s songs cover rambling Allman Brothers styled country-rock, reggae rhythms crossed with New Orleans’ fiddles, a hot-picked double mandolin instrumental, piano-based ballads, old-timey country, Celtic fiddles, close harmony and Stonesy blues. He mixes originals with traditional tunes (“Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down”) and selected covers (Hoagy Carmichael’s “Hong Kong Blues” and Cy Coben’s country bluegrass “A Good Woman’s Love”). The original “Faded Love” is sung to a mandolin and flute arrangement that’s distinctly Japanese, and the closing “That’s What It’s Like to Be Alone” is given a chamber pop arrangement replete with harpsichord. Darrow’s “We’re Living on $15 a week,” with its upbeat depression-era optimism is sadly applicable amid the ruins of today’s world economy.

Under My Own Disguise follows a similarly varied course, but more tightly bunched around country sounds, including fiddle-led Zydeco, steel guitar ballads, Allman-styled rock, dusty gospel soul, acoustic rags, blues, and the sort of pop-country-rock hybrid that Gram Parsons termed “cosmic American music.” The album’s featured cover is a Hot Club styled country-jazz take on the Ink Spots’ “Java Jive.” Darrow has an appealingly unfinished voice – tuneful, but unpolished. He’s mixed especially low into the instrumentation on Under My Own Disguise, giving the impression of an introvert more comfortable as a sideman than a leader. No matter, as his melodies and musical textures carry a great deal of emotion. Thirty-five years on, these tracks sound fresh and contemporary, and offer up hidden nuggets of California country. [©2009 hyperbolium dot com]

MP3 | Take Good Care of Yourself
Chris Darrow’s MySpace Page

Country, country rock and blues with a loose ‘70s vibe

Ted Russell Kamp is an L.A. session player and regular bass player for Shooter Jennings who’s released a string of solo albums that began with 1996’s jazz session Dedications. Nine years later he returned as a front man with a whole new sound that combined roots and rock. The rustic inflections saw him through NorthSouth, Nashville Fineline, Divisadero and now his latest, Poor Man’s Paradise. Kamp sings in a voice similar to Rodney Crowell, but the loose vibe of his music has its roots in the 1970s, the free-swinging twang of Nashville, the laid-back cool of California country-rock, and the Southern inflections of Florida’s Criteria Studios and Alabama’s Muscle Shoals. He even adds a one-man horn section of overdubbed trumpet and trombone on a few tracks. Kamp writes frequently on matters of the heart, including departed lovers still too close to be forgotten, couples staring at one another across a chasm of faith, and the contentedness of having your soul mate by your side. In league with his talents as a multi-instrumental, Kamp’s a genre-hopping songwriter, offering up southern rock (“Long Distance Man”), talking blues (“Ballad of That Guy,” with Marvin Etzioni picking mandolin) and blue-eyed soul (“Never Gonna Do You Wrong”), in addition to country-rock. Though he’s best served by the ballads and mid-tempo numbers, just about everything here is nicely crafted and worth a spin. [©2009 hyperbolium dot com]

MP3 | Just a Yesterday Away
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