Eastmountainsouth – Eastmountainsouth
Robbie Robertson offers the following sticker blurb: “This music could have been made 50 years ago and just as easily be what music sounds like 50 years from now”. That’s not an unassailable endorsement, for dull music was made in the 1950s and will be made again in the 2050s. The implication, though, is that the debut from this California duo is timeless. It’s not.
Eastmountainsouth (essentially Peter Adams and Kat Maslich) would not have been possible in any time but our own. The debt this dainty but painstaking record owes to Wrecking Ball and Steady On, Suzanne Vega and the McGarrigle sisters, Mitchell Froom (who helped produce and plays keys) and Daniel Lanois is so palpable that one can’t help but feel executive producer Robertson is protesting too much. The influences aren’t crippling, just unconvincing.
Opening with Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times”, Adams and Maslich offer sweet, raspy harmonies, but the elaborate trance-folk arrangement undercuts the lyric’s meaning. Maslich sounds (and writes) more like Dar Williams than her hero Rickie Lee Jones; Adams’ voice recalls Slaid Cleaves, but his sensibility, like his partner’s, is all about conjuring ambience and atmosphere, as if songwriting could be dispensed with in like manner: “As the ruby in the setting/As the fruit upon the tree/As the wind blows over the plains/So are you to me.”
The album’s cumulative impression is impressionism. Wisping out from some quaint, gentry-friendly cafe, the pretty harmonies, pretty percussive grooves, pretty Greg Leisz string textures might be a good soundtrack for sipping something pricey. Get a little closer, the songs evaporate; they were never really there to begin with