The Gourds’ ninth studio release, their first for Yep Roc, continues to mix equal parts genre-blending road-honed instrumental grooves, iconic verbal turns, and impenetrably opaque lyrics. The musical hooks are ample, but the memorable verbal phrases are shiny fragments rather than whole jewels, rendered in tone and words rather than characters or story. Perhaps it’s the overall obscurity that makes descriptive shards like “lonely as a weather balloon” stand out in such sharp relief.
The bulk of the lyrics on Noble Creatures are rhyming nonsequiturs of R.E.M.-like mystery, but the album’s centerpiece, “Promenade”, provides a moment of translucence. Kevin Russell’s anguished monologue of romantic dissolution is annotated with poetic images (“There’s a sadness on its way/It’s like a ghost that knows my address”) but is centered on a perceptible narrative that gives the Gourds a new dimension. More traditionally impressionistic is the road staple “Steeple Full Of Swallows”, sung more coarsely than the Damnations’ 2002 cover.
The band’s strongest card continues to be the effortless breadth and musicality that takes them from the snappy Mavericks-styled country-soul horns of the opener “How Will You Shine” to the ’70s Stones/Geils groove of “A Few Extra Kilos” and the Steve Miller/Doug Sahm vibe of “The Gryoscopic”. Noble Creatures moves with the greatest of ease through somber ballads, toe-tapping zydeco, hill country twang and swampy blues-rock. The overarching impression may still be the lack of actual stories, but the music will have you moving and grooving while you try to untangle the words.