Bombadil - All That the Rain Promises

Ramseur Records

All That the Rain Promises marks Bombadil's welcome return to the studio following their extended hiatus in 2009–2010. For those of us who have loved and evangelized their first three releases – Bomdadil EP (2006), A Buzz, A Buzz (2008), and Tarpits and Canyonlands (2009) – Promises provides yet another album’s worth of baroque ballads, neo-pub canons, and trapper keeper torch songs to keep us warm through the cold winter. Expect standout tracks such as the anthemic indie rocker “Laundromat” and the twilit “Short Side of the Wall” to begin popping up on “best of” lists and year-end mixtapes.

As beautifully crafted as it is, however, Promises gives the distinct impression of a band in transition. As you might reasonably expect of a band returning from a long and uncertain layoff, there are moments here when the talented four piece sounds somewhat unsure what to keep from their past work and what to let go. The overly nice “Flour Water Sugar,” for instance, initially recalls Tarpits’ “Kuala Lumpur” but never quite manages the latter’s romping descent into anarchic joy. So too the near-twee confessional “A Question” is the kind of musical meet-cute that the band should probably put behind them.

That said, Bombadil’s commitment to lighter fare has always worked to clear away emotional space so that their heavier material can hit with greater impact. Longtime listeners will think of Buzz’s “Three Saddest Words” or Tarpits’ “Matthew” as songs that are all the more devastating given the sweetness and light that surrounds them. Reviewers have rightly pointed to Bombadil’s impressive use of vocal dynamics to create depth
and space (the arranged vocal harmonies on Promises, as ever, are rich and surprising), but too few have noted this dynamism at work in their lyrical themes as well – an initial childlike wonder often lays the foundation for a later sobering heartbreak. In a departure from previous releases, however, Promises’ opener “I Will Wait” plays the part of the emotional heavy here. A beautifully spare hymn that calls out for spiritual strength and perfect understanding, “I Will Wait” challenges the listener with a raw humility and divine frustration not often found outside of John Donne’s holy sonnets. It’s an immediate call to attention and establishes a powerful theme for a collective that has been forced to confront – in a way that many others have not – their own musical mortality. All of which must make the rebirth that the rain promises seem all the sweeter. --Hidden Tiger


Post Script
Bombadil will celebrate Promises with a release show this Saturday Nov. 12 at Cat's Cradle in Carrboro, NC. The Future Kings of Nowhere and JKutchma open. 9 PM $12 advance/$15 door. tickets

Album Reviews: Gasoline Stove, Vultures on the Mainframe & The Brand New Life, Brand New Life

Gasoline Stove will appear at the Station in Carrboro today, Thursday, August 26th.
The Brand New Life will celebrate their Chapel Hill release party at Jessee's in Carrboro Friday, September 3rd.

The first album from Gasoline Stove, songwriter Scott Morgan’s new acoustic outfit featuring the nucleus of his seminal country rock band Memphis, feels like the cool Sunday morning following the latter group’s hot Saturday night. And while you might therefore expect to find plenty of regret and sober reflection on Vultures on the Mainframe, Gasoline Stove also know that Sunday’s in the South are often days of celebration and hopeful rededication.

One of Morgan’s best attributes as a songwriter has always been the trust he places in the listener to stay with a song, even if it (gasp!) doesn’t dive into a hook within the first minute. On the album’s opener, “Streamline to Memphis,” for instance, Morgan and wife Shannon sing over an anxiously strummed guitar that continually threatens to break into a furious chorus but never quite does. The effect is one of increasing tension as the haggard voice of the narrator delves deep into his memory in attempt to connect past with present. The song is a suitable primer for the album as a whole. Whereas much of Memphis’ work was built around soaring instrumental jams, the pared down approach of Vultures allows Morgan to go long form with his lyrics. Songs like “Miss Purcell” and “Sunny Day Suicide” read more like lost character notes from a William Gay novel than the glib or scrubbed down image making you generally expect to find in this genre.

Of course, Vultures has a number of more polished radio ready tunes as well. The two songs at the thematic center of the album showcase Morgan’s songwriting talent in more conventional terms. The infectious, call’n’responder “Snakes!” features Morgan’s sly eastern philosophizing masquerading as a stomping spiritual, and the lovely, bittersweet “Love and Rockets” is both a love song and a prayer to be made whole.

Gasoline Stove introduces local musician Anthony Lener to provide upright bass and features Memphis alum Pete Lucey on piano, organ, and accordion. Lucey again figures as Morgan’s alter ego here, adding strokes of color and light to Morgan’s sometimes stark arrangements. As you might expect from a married couple, the Morgans’ intertwining vocals hint at secrets and unspoken understanding even as the songs themselves seem to lay bare so much shared wisdom about love, trust, and forgiveness.

A very different but no less welcome debut comes from the young guns in Greensboro’s free form funk septet the Brand New Life. Their self-titled release is big and lively, balancing balls out bluster and finely turned craft to create a sound that impresses immediately and deepens with repeated listens.

Musical collectives that excel at improvisation can sometimes feel small and cramped on record, but BNL does a fine job here of translating the energy and imagination of their live shows to wax. Most of the members of BNL developed their musical identities playing alongside one another in informal musical projects in Greensboro, so they’re generally able to make their complex arrangements feel like a seamless fit and create the necessary space for each other to shine.

The album begins with the tropicali yawp of “Ra!” before settling into a funky middle section that glides with the irrepressible cool of a 70s era stakeout film. The rhythm section – consisting of bassist Seth Barden and percussionists Daniel Yount and Evan Frierson -- is bold without ever being showy, while guitarist Ben Rayle’s sidewinder phrasing adds an otherworldly air that serves as an effective counterpoint to the horn sections’ muscular lyricism. Lovers of horn driven music will find much to enjoy about the dueling partnership of saxophonists Casey Cranford and Walter Francourt, who provide BNL with its essential voice. Vocalist and tuba player Jared Mankoff plays alternating roles as a devilish shaman who wrily unsettles the more structured works and as a boisterous ringmaster who conducts the raucous six-ring circus swirling behind him.

To call Brand New Life a promising debut album is to mistake the product for process. The young musicians here already possess the singular voice and sound of a seasoned band. Whatever transformations their musical expression continues to take on will owe more to creative exploration than a refining and polishing of talent. --Hidden Tiger


Post Script
Gasoline Stove will appear at the Station in Carrboro Thursday, August 26th.
The Brand New Life will celebrate their Chapel Hill release party at Jessee's in Carrboro Friday, September 3rd.

Album Review: Rat Jackson - Midnight Get Right

It’s now a matter of shared faith among all of us – tweedy Chomskyites, Oprahfied eat-pray-lovers, Farm Town enthusiasts – that we can uncover vast regions of the individual psyche simply by boiling life down to a couple of choices between two related but dissimilar items.

You know the ones. Is my stepsister’s new boyfriend going to take her on a six state killing spree? Hey there, Aldo, Beatles or Stones? Do I really want to plan a surprise birthday party with my fiance’s grandmother? Would you say you’re more of a boxers or a briefs gal, Joanne?

But can all this weighty Column A’ing and Column B’ing actually take us to the heart of anything meaningful?

Rat Jackson frontman Tad Jackson faces just such a choice in the opening moments of “Sexy Waitress” when he’s asked if he’ll be having the chicken or the steak. But as anyone who’s witnessed Rat Jackson’s balls out live show over the last few years knows, Rat Jackson will never worry about food when there’s a waitress to be had instead. And that choice does, in fact, tell us all we need to know about the Rat Jackson Rock’n’Roll Band.

Whether they’re dealing with sex, love, rock, sex, booze, sex, or sex, much of what feels exciting and fresh on Rat Jackson’s new debut record, Midnight Get Right, comes from their dead-eye focus on what really matters in love and music: making the heads bob and the knees shake. True to form, there’s no foreplay here. The band kicks off the covers in mid stroke with the call and response screamer “Holler and Jump” before stepping out into the swaggering back alley braggadocio of the title track, pursued by the wild dog slide guitar of lead guitarist Steve Oliva.

Although Get Right’s best track is probably “Summer Hummer” (a staple of the live set and the perfect showcase for bassist Rusty Sutton and drummer Chester Jackson’s skillful interplay of dance party rock), it’s a newer composition “Motorcycle Horse” that really warms up with repeated listens. As a love song to an imaginary chariot of female procurement it exchanges the more comic book dimensions of White Zombie’s “Black Sunshine” for the inspired trapper keeper fever dreams of a ninth grader in biology lab. But even at the heights of their most adolescent fantasies, Rat Jackson always manages to throw out the telling detail that keeps things grounded, as here our hero lothario promises to ply his new woman with round of cider and erotic photohunt.

We’ve known from our cradles that rock is at its best when it’s loud, fast and about fucking. But we tend to get caught up in thinking the answer lies somewhere on one side of an either/or divide. While other local rock bands are busy trying to figure out a clever angle or a new way to dress up to their craft, Rat Jackson walks up wearing nothing but an ascot and a jock strap and gets on with getting it on. They’ve built an aesthetic around the ability to recognize and eliminate these false choices that sometimes blind us to what we really want. And what we really want is a half motorcycle half horse. --Hidden Tiger

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Post Script:

Saturday August 7th, Rat Jackson pulls together Red Collar, Aminal, and Reid Johnson at Broad Street Cafe for the Midnight Get Right album release party. Broad Street owner/promoter John Hite comments;

As a warmup for this event, the Broad Street Cafe will be tapping a special cask of of Triangle Brewing's Imperial Amber at 6pm! This strong amber ale has a strong malt presence that holds this brew together. IBUs of around 90 balance the brew which is dry hopped to add an invigorating citrus and floral aroma that linge...

Broad Street Cafe
1116 Broad Street
Durham, NC

click for facebook event link:

EP Review: Honored Guests Into Nostalgia

(Breakfast Mascot Music)

One of the welcome outcomes of the recent implosion of the music industry has been the reemergence of the EP as the de facto release format for independent artists. Enter on cue the The Honored Guests' new release Into Nostalgia, a record not only designed musically for the middle distances of the EP but one that also dives headlong into thematic issues of size, proportion, scale, and measure.

While the Guests’ first two releases, iawokeinacityasleep and Tastes Change, established their bend for the reflective and the understated as well as their interest in notions of maturity, Into Nostalgia is their first fully mature record; it expresses throughout the wisdom of those who have lived a little space beyond the false bravado and certain idealisms of youth. Just a few years ago the Guests were one of the more nomadic local bands, playing shows anywhere from Florida to California; now, they’re comfortably settled down, pleased to spend the long winter making a record and emerging every so often to play a local show.

As the title of the EP suggests, the heart of these songs’ maturity rests in a wholesale understanding of nostalgia. Too often a dress-up emotion donned by young artists, nostalgia is here presented in its proper light, full of both the self-discovery and the self-deception involved in why and how we remember. While the sprightly, Brit-poppish “Jimmy’s A Cop Now” represents frontman Russ Baggett’s clearest and most sustained sojourn into specific memory, it is on the gorgeous standout track “Paper Cuts” where his keen insight into the meaning of these memories finds fullest form. “Taken one by one, paper cuts, “ Baggett sings over a breezily-strummed acoustic guitar, “funny how the world sized me up.”

It is this bittersweet recognition that the world has our measure, despite all of our efforts to the contrary, that shines through here and pervades the beautiful simplicity and space of the Guests’ arrangements. They remind us that it often isn’t the momentous and large-scale lapses that wound us most meaningfully, but the thousand little cuts that the world inflicts. With this recognition, however, comes not bitterness and resentment but a certain happy resignation and even love for the world as it is.

Nostalgia is a fiction, we’re told, an artist’s rendering of the past. Into Nostalgia expresses a devout wish to move beyond the false tones of artifice. “I want you to see through me,” Baggett announces on the EP’s concluding track, “I don’t like how words suggest when the poetry’s right.” Not that the Guests have given up on their feverish dream poetry; see, for instance, the marvelous, lulling “Chasing Some Wild Sheep Chasing the Wasp.” But there is something clear and stark here that propels the six tracks purposefully, something that’s wary of indulgence or saying too much. Something that wants to feel exactly right. --Hidden Tiger


post script
The Honored Guests play their first show after releasing this EP at Nightlight in Chapel Hill on Saturday June 26 with Pros and Cons , and Western Civ. 10 PM $5 cover.

THREE BY THE SEA

Big Al Hall and the Marching Rams The Marching Rams
Onward, Soldiers Ghosts in this Town
Charlie the Horse When U Gonna Luv Somebody?

Three new releases from Wilmington bands highlight the renaissance of roots and Americana music in Carolina’s port city. The most traditional of these is also in some ways the most dynamic. The Marching Rams marks the first full-length effort from Alex “Big Al” Hall’s new supergroup of Wilmington area old-time and traditional musicians featuring Hall on banjo and fiddle, Lincoln Morris on guitar, Jones Smith on bass, and Kevin Rhodes on trap set and accordion.

Although Hall aligns himself philosophically with much of the post-punk rediscovery of old-time music, he’s certainly no recent convert to the genre. Having spent much of his youth traveling to fiddlers’ conventions and traditional music festivals around the US searching for the pre-war arrangements of mountain songs, Hall has become as fine an interpreter and arranger of Southern and American folkways as you’ll find performing anywhere.

And it’s just these hard-won bona fides that allow Hall such freedom and joy of expression. Recorded live over the course of a single day in David Lowery’s Sound of Music studio in Richmond, Virginia, the 12 song collection burns away the layers of accumulated age and presents each song as if it were freshly written. On the oft-covered “Fall on My Knees,” for example, Hall’s rich and aching tenor lays bare the stark pain lurking beneath the easy humor of the lover’s lament. The collection’s two most inspired performances, a spirited update of Ola Belle Reed’s arrangement of “Boat’s Up the River” and a decidedly raucous version of “Red Rocking Chair,” find the Rams ready to explode into the ether while Hall’s assured phrasing keeps them grounded and centered. Indeed, throughout The Marching Rams, Hall wisely contrasts his weary, lonesome vocal phrasing with the big-tent percussive power of Morris, Smith, and Rhodes. As a result, the tunes rarely throw all their energy behind a single emotional pitch or vamp broadly as affectation. They discover, instead, that dusty patch of ground where we all go about fussing over our own lives.

Rhodes and Smith also provide the rhythm and roll for Onward, Soldiers’ debut platter Ghosts in This Town. At their best, Sean Thomas Gerard’s songs effortlessly marry sweet, progressive electric folk to the nostalgic pangs of traditional arrangements, calling to mind both the Black Crowes looser B-sides as well as the white-knuckle gothic of Texas surf. Gerard’s speakers seem at times young men frustrated by a world they want desperately to love and at others to be old souls slowly rediscovering the simple beauties. Regardless, Gerard’s ghosts are inveterate talkers and showman, drunk with the possibilities of the material world around them to broadcast their poetry. Thus in “Let the Time Roll By” parking meters become microphones just as jailed midwives are commandeered as choristers. In “Relic” a picture frame transforms into the pursed lips of a lover’s kiss and, later, a mother’s promise.

Throughout Ghosts, Onward, Soldiers builds its aesthetic on a fever dream of movement. Gerard’s anxiously strummed acoustic guitar parries meaningfully with Rhodes’ fluttering brush and stick work. Rather than simple wanderlust, however, the songs here feel pursued. As if a dark and ugly past is always threatening to overtake Gerard’s cast of highway ghosts and sidewalk preachers as they journey to the end of each coda.

Newcomers Charlie the Horse, on the other hand, are totally unencumbered by the weight of the past, focused as they are on a vivid and tumbling present. Although the least assured of these new releases, When U Gonna Luv Somebody? represents the boldest statement of intent among the three. Frontman Andrew Zucchino’s clear and confident vocal delivery brings to mind Adam Stephens of Two Gallants, but where Stephens often employs his desperate growl as a siege engine of anger and regret, Zucchino seems content to serenade the stars with his love-struck vibrato. As a collective Charlie the Horse already possesses an impressively diverse color palette intended for a wide canvas. The results can be ponderous at times, but when everything clicks, as on the bustling stomp of “Thunderstorm” or the slow burn of the stereolit “Fever,” Somebody demands full and careful attention. Charlie the Horse has quickly built a strong reputation as live performers in Wilmington, so it’s heartening to find how much of that live energy the quintet has succeeding in transferring to wax.

Charlie the Horse will be opening for Sinful Savage Tigers Thursday, May 13th at the Cave in Chapel Hill. As well as for Jeremy Blair From Effingham, Saturday May 15th at the Broad Street Café in Durham. --Hidden Tiger

Album Review: Brett Harris, Man of Few Words

Brett Harris Music, 2010

Too often songwriters whose sensibilities have been nurtured by the audible hiss of cheap mic’s and tape machines stumble upon first sight of the space and power of a pro studio. Given the keys to the proverbial gear closet, they prove either too sheepish or too greedy in deciding what to pull out of it. So it’s a welcome change when one of these basement troubadours takes an accurate measure of his material and emerges from the big desk with something sparkling and seamless. That’s the happy case with Brett Harris's Man of Few Words, the Durham songwriter’s first full-length studio album, and one that fulfills the spry promise of his two earlier EPs. With Man, Harris and producer Jeff Crawford have created a sound that can be big without bullying and arrangements that are lush though never overbearing.

The giddy opener “I Found Out” serves both as harbinger of a bright new beginning for Harris as well as a multum in parvo for the album as a whole. An anxiously strummed acoustic guitar quickly gives way to 12 string electrics, blond organs, pianos, tympanis, string arrangements and brassy horn sections that expand and contract along with Harris’s flights of fancy. Throughout Man, Harris’s compositions benefit mightily from the supporting cast he’s assembled, which includes Crawford on bass and a murderer’s row of local musicians familiar to fans of MAX Indian and Luego. As they did on their own debut last year, Indian’s Nick Jaeger and Carter Gaj prove here again that a well-crafted guitar fill can be every bit as revelatory as a blistering solo.

For all the help Harris gets from his friends, however, Man’s punch lies in the frontman’s vocal performance. Lithe but limber, Harris’s voice plays equally well as solo instrument or stacked in one of the album’s many rich, midrange harmonies, In the past, Harris has earned comparisons to Elvis Costello and Jeff Buckley, but in its phrasing and texture, Harris’s delivery on this effort often evokes more ethereal singers like Phoenix’s Thomas Mars or Sukilove’s Pascal Deweze, euros from whom the 80s blue eyed soul phenomenon was a less problematic influence than for Americans.

It’s a little ironic then that Man’s lone weakness comes with what Harris has to say. While his lyrics tend to satisfy the concept of the songs, they also at times suffer from a lack of ambition, especially compared to a number of the songs on his previous EPs. The album’s title notwithstanding, Harris is not a man of few words by any means, but the surface sheen and polish of the sentiment often makes it difficult to judge depth. In these cases the result is expression that is comfortable rather than particularly memorable.

Not coincidentally, the album’s two best cuts – “Perpetual Motion” and “See the Light” – find Harris developing a sustained lyrical conceit that informs and intercedes with the arrangement and the melody, rather than simply floating over the top. In “Perpetual Motion,” for example, the feverish rejoinder, “gotta keep on movin,” plays call and response as a piano signature bounces like a gypsum ball across Charles Cleaver’s roulette wheel organ.

After the light and embraceable pop of the album’s A side, “Perpetual Motion” and “See the Light” seem to promise a more introspective turn on the way out. Although what follows doesn’t quite bear out this promise (later cuts such as “Wish” and “Over and Over” feel more like genre exercises than compositions that reward what Harris does best), Harris certainly proves that he’s not just another open-mic strummer with an ear for a catchy hook, but a serious songwriter with big ideas and in full control of his material. --Hidden Tiger


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Brett Harris will celebrate the release of Man of Few Words at Nightlight in Chapel Hill on Friday April 2, 2010 at 10 PM. Opening will be Raleigh's Bright Young Things and Durham alt. country rockers Luego.