So it’s not exactly Metal Machine Music. Nonetheless, the third disc from the Minneapolis roots-rock quartet Bellwether is a departure for the band — which, if you agree that its self-titled slab of two years back contained one indistinguishably strummy number after another, cribbed too liberally from predecessors and Bellwether homeboys such as the Jayhawks and Gear Daddies, and suffered from overly fussy production — is a good thing.
If you haven’t heard the band’s earlier work — and since their discs have been self-released, you probably haven’t — you need only know that Home Late is a good thing. It’s a modest album, but full of small rewards, among them Eric Luoma’s percussive wordplay (“At a dim-light afternoon desk in a box/Sat a half-lit half-wit home for the lost”), Luoma and Jimmy Peterson’s neatly matched vocal harmonies, and the warm, sweet sounds of accordion, harmonica, Razz Russell’s fiddle, and Eric Heywood’s unmistakable steel guitar.
Home Late differs from Bellwether’s previous efforts in tempo and tone. The pace of only a couple of the album’s dozen tunes quickens to a shuffle; mostly the songs just float along with the fiddle or a brushed snare. The bare-bones production makes much of practically nothing, as area mikes and reverb create an empty, lonely sound to fit the moody minimalism of “Shallowing”, “Betweenville”, and “West End”, which recalls Califone’s incidental percussion and feedback drone.
It may be no great leap forward, but Home Late is an intriguing sidestep.