Jeffrey Foucault – Ghost Repeater

There is no America like the one that serves as a backdrop for the songs on Jeffrey Foucault’s aching new album. There may never have been. But if there was, it was a pre-digital place, a land of drugstore pay phones and hitched rides on dusty roads leading somewhere, anywhere, far away.

That’s not to say Ghost Repeater is a throwback album; Foucault isn’t beholden to the retro fetish lurking in modern music, he’s simply writing songs. It’s not that simple, though, because his spare, rootsy tunes are deceptively complex. He’s a skilled observer, shifting easily between general observations about life and startling first-person details, relating both in a tousled voice that resonates with a certain lived-in wisdom.

Guitarist and producer Bo Ramsey (Greg Brown, Lucinda Williams) augments Foucault’s acoustic songs with sinewy fills on electric guitar, adding a high-lonesome feel to “Americans In Corduroys” and ominous undertones to “Train To Jackson”. The title track is the real stunner here, though. The lyrics are full of lonely imagery: credits roll in empty movie houses and gone-to-seed town squares sit vacant. Foucault borrows an old blues refrain for the chorus, singing “Dark was the night, cold was the ground”; the homage ties together the threads of blues, folk and country that run through the album.