Nashville Bluegrass Band – American Beauty
To its credit, contemporary bluegrass seeks out songs to match the stuff upon which its history has been built. To be sure, the flawless picking and harmonizing of the bluegrass albums that fall out of my mailbox can be a dizzying and disconcerting thing. And yet I sometimes wonder why such virtuosity is given to rather mundane, even tame material.
The Nashville Bluegrass Band has most often reached for the elusive classical quality in the contemporary songs they’ve covered. They showed the smarts to introduce Gillian Welch’s “Tear My Stillhouse Down” to bluegrass culture, and on American Beauty, they give Welch’s live staple “Red Clay Halo” opening privileges. It’s a delightful, rolling, infectious performance. And for most of the album they maintain that interpretive excellence: A Dylan toss-off, “Livin’ The Blues”, becomes a revelation in mandolinist’s Roland White’s rare, scruffy, old-timey lead vocal; Dave Allen’s ballad “Down A Winding Road” is sweet and never saccharine, aided by the masterful Stuart Duncan’s understated fiddle sweeps.
The album sputters slightly on Kate Campbell’s “Signs Following”, a gothic homily about snake handling and domestic violence; and, in truth, little can justify the strained social commentary of “Homeless Waltz”. If the band’s 12th record is hardly their best — that would be Waiting For The Hard Times To Go — it still has some of this year’s most satisfying, straight-ahead bluegrass moments.