Michael Rank’s Red Hand is Doing Alright
NO DEPRESSION
Posted On September 24, 2016
Snatches of Pink’s Stag (2005) was Michael Rank’s raw rock and roll take on Aerosmith meets Royal Trux. When SOP disbanded he eventually forged on and shifted gears with his musical collective Michael Rank and Stag. Over the course of five excellent albums the volume, electric guitars, and drums gradually faded out and mandolin, pedal steel and fiddle became prominent fixtures in Rank’s evolving organic alternative Appalachian sound. The Michael Rank and Stag albums were shrouded in a darkness as he lamented, sometimes bitterly, a relationship lost while celebrating the silver lining of his shattered marriage, the birth of his son. The denial, anger, bargaining and depression (for any Kubler-Ross fans out there) have largely faded and Red Hand (Louds Hymn, 2016) finds Rank dropping the Stag moniker and accepting his situation with a new perspective that at times borders on optimism:
“doing alright in the morning
doing alright around midday
doing alright in the meantime
honey thats more than most can say”
Over the past four years Rank has consistently recruited exceptionally talented female singers over including Emily Frantz (Mandolin Orange), Skylar Gudasz, and more recently Heather McEntire (Mount Moriah) who graced several tracks on Horsehair (2015) but now joins Rank on every Red Hand track. Heather’s the perfect foil and sings as an equal on what is billed as a solo album but is essentially an album of duets.
The rustic dusty tracks featuring mandolin (Ron Bartholomew) and fiddle (Gabriel Pelli and Jon Teer) on Red Hand wouldn’t sound out of place on a front porch in the 1870s but on several tracks Rank reverses the trend of subtraction and adds back sax, Wurlitzer and Hammond Organ which flesh out and color the tracks with a fuller late 1970s FM radio sound. The easy trope? Gram and Emmylou but to my ears Cat Stevens paired with a young edgy Dolly Parton (and no I don’t think that ever happened) would be closer to the sound and feel of one of my favorite discs of the year. With Red Hand Rank adds the final piece to the (his) puzzle. Highly recommended.
Michael and Heather portrait by Andy Tenille
