review: David Rosenfield- Son of Ojito

Originally Published at The Blue Indian on July 13, 2011.

To start, David Rosenfield’s Son of Ojito promises an interesting mix, a veritable gumbo, of poetry, folk, blues, punk-rock storytelling. The fourteen tracks seethe with pledges of unorthodox hippy ditties in the vane of mewithoutYou or Edward Sharpe, but ultimately fail to deliver the goods on that oath. The result is an album of busky, suitcase songs, tinged with open-mic emoting and Shel Silverstein jejunery.

This album was incredibly approachable and, for me, initially appealing. Lest you think I’m being too hard on this one, let me try to explain. I wanted to love it; I wanted to sink my teeth into the zanily imaginative snapshots. To put it culinarily: I wasn’t expecting fine dining. I wasn’t hungry for fillet or lobster. I didn’t expect silverware or cloth napkins. I was okay with that. It seemed Rosenfield’s album was to be some sort of fused streetfood, served in a corn tortilla out of the side of an old plumbing truck, alloying cultures and sensibilities. I readied my taste-(ear)buds, and prepared a makeshift bib out of a single-ply napkin, but when I took my first bite, it lacked the basics, the salt and the pepper, and the chicken was a bit on the pink side.

Underdeveloped, most tunes lacked the passion and believability they warranted. Sing It exudes some of the Danielsonian charm, laced with dormy acoustics and a campy chorus, that this artist and album are capable of. “Streetlights Playing Dixie” sounds like a song begun in one of John Darnielle’s old notebooks, while “The Cat’s Meowing” too bears some of the marks of playful potential.

Rosenfield will undoubtedly continue to cook. My hope is not only that these tunes continue to marinate and develop, but also that he hones his unique recipes into something even more square and satisfying.

Rating: 2.5/10

review: Skylar Gudasz & The Ugly Girls- Two Headed Monster

Originally Published at The Blue Indian on June 7, 2011.

After the bizarre announcement earlier this year that Rufus Wainwright would father the resulting offspring of himself and Leonard Cohen’s daughter, the mere metaphor of musical love-childhood largely pales. Skylar Gudasz may not be the real or imagined kin of such folk giants as a Cohen, a Wainwright, or, say Joni Mitchell, but her and her compatriots’ debut forces such family resemblances.

Two Headed Monster, while clocking in at a all-too-brief twenty nine minutes, weaves tales of midnight-lovers and dream-believers, while painting airy, tranced, sonic landscapes. From the opener, which sits you on the steps of a house in Nowheresville (which simultaneously doubles as Anytown, USA), there is both a fantastic unfamiliarity and a comforting mundanity to the scenery that only happens while you dream.

The warm, trademarked organ whir of producer Jeff Crawford continues on the second track, Killing, perhaps the most accessible and infectious of the album. Gudasz leaves behind the mystery and mystique of Hotel Chelsea lobby muzak for a just a moment to surprisingly channel the absolute best of a nineties coffeehouse Sheryl Crow.

Bison re-injects the kind of tension and drama that can only lead to the extrication of someone who “ain’t taking your words as roots no more.” The freedom of her characters’ newfound “fast sets of legs” sprint throughout the remainder of the album amid the Ugly Girls’ (spoiler alert: they’re really boys!) poppy “badda bahs” and William Taylor’s precise tone on his diligent solos. Skylar’s voice only gets deeper and richer as the album winds to the end of its breathless half hour.

The shape-noted O West closes by employing a gifted choir of some of Triangle NC’s finest young guns. As the choristers’ voices rise Casey Toll’s gravitational double bass tethers the ghoulish party to the studio floor. Keep your eye and ears on this young band, such a mature debut can only lead to yet unexplored, dreamier, more expansive vistas.

Rating: 8/10

review: Arthur Alligood- I Have Not Seen The Wind

Originally Published at The Blue Indian on March 15, 2011.

Who has seen the wind?

Neither I nor you:

But when the leaves hang trembling,

The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?

Neither you nor I:

But when the trees bow down their heads,

The wind is passing by.

-Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

I know nobody wants to be preached at. I know no one wants to be made aware of where they’ve come up short. Where they could do better. Where their vision is blurry, their faith shaky, their knowledge incomplete. Where they took what wasn’t theirs or thought better or worse than was the case. But maybe our best friends are those that know how to preach to us without coming off as self-righteous. They tell us the kind of truth that make us want to be the kind of person that believes it. Maybe the most intimate conversations are just really good sermons. Maybe confessing your own crap is the best homeletical move: vulnerability over fire and/or brimstone. And maybe good sermons can be better poems. Maybe they can even be woven into an album of great songs.

Enter Arthur Alligood: a preacher disguised as a folk singer. At the get-go, Alligood hums the sparse tune “Show Some Heart,” pleading earnestly with the listener to let down some walls, unlock some doors, and follow some of those suppressed dreams. He might as well have written this tune with a busted guitar over late-night drinks with Bill Mallonee.

He hauls the next several songs over Wallflowers dirt roads, all chugging percussion and whining steel. Just as I Have Not Seen the Wind starts really moving with Nashvillian adroitness, Alligood crashes with the confessional “Piece Me Together.” And in so doing, he empties any pretention that he knows exactly where he’s going.

Alligood re-mounts his whistle-stop soapbox on “Gavel”: the sweetest, most Townes Van Zandt-ian polemic against hypocrisy and shallow judgmentalism I’ve ever heard. Instead of harping on the sodden now, or looking for a clean-slated future, he asks us to remember the past when we “were better as a criminal begging for a second chance.”

The title track, for me, actually surpasses Alligood’s own humbly-opinioned tune for best-written song on the album. Alligood grafts an image from the Bible into an allusive and illustrative prayer. The small, humble situatedness that Alligood shares with Christiana Rossetti and sings like Josh Ritter is a powerful centerpiece, a saw dust altar call, of sorts, to the type of meekness that shall inherit the earth.

Rating: 8.4/10

review: luz- Light Among Other Things

Originally Published at The Blue Indian on March 14, 2011.

In just under 32 minutes, Charlotte, NC’s luz (formatted that way) manages to bring you on a bumpy sonic ride of fear, faith, and vulnerability. The goal of this project, seemingly, from a band with such a name, is to illuminate via lyric and musical texture what it means to move from dark to light; despair and disrepair to hope and wholeness. Interspersed with screeching atmospheric guitar and affective ambient noise, the EP is an offering from an honest young artist to do just this.

Stephen Morrison strives to express and discover what it means to have “religion” and “try believing.” The record’s opener, “Nobody Knows My Name,” reads as a hopeful lament. The blues: frustrated with stuck-ness, fearful of the pain that change might involve, but hopeful for that better future. There’s always a tinge of hope in the blues.

“Try Believing” continues this narrative, starts to employing more of the light (than the “other things”) in order to dream of possibilities, and to struggle to find an apt “object for affection.“ The future again proves simultaneously hopeful and dreadful. Kids. Family. Fulfillment. Security. In the immediate present: none of this, and no way to get there. This is an achingly practical take on what it means to believe. To believe that these will come about, to not despair in how long they take to form, and to not force the issue in the meanwhile. The substance of the belief we’re being invited into being “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

The next few tracks shed but more glow on the danger of living this way, leaving behind. “What I Leave” and “Come On Honey” weave eerie vocal harmonies and aggressive guitar sections to form a tapestry of regret-tinged remembrance and forward-moving closure.

Finally, “Effect” (which could have come right off of For Emma, Forever Ago), uses Bon Iver’s sprawling falsetto to close the journey. This is perhaps the short album’s pinnacle, where the band most artfully combines all the threads its been pulling, with the effect of exposing the false and pursuing “new ways to get born.”

Rating: 6.7/10