Used to be a time you could tell where a band was from just by listening to the music. There wasn’t a band in the UK who could make country sound country or in the US make trad folk sound trad folk. It wasn’t the accent necessarily or the instrumentation or anything you could put your finger on, it just was. But somewhere, sometime, the barriers disappeared. All of a sudden Brits started sounding American and Americans started sounding Australian and Brazilians started sounding like they grew up in Boston or New York or maybe Nashville or Austin. Americana should not be allowed to be called Americana anymore, in fact, because Europe and Australia are playing it better than Americans at times.
I mention this because I have been listening to an Irish band calling themselves The Southern Fold and they sound no more Irish than does Stephen Young & The Union or The Minnows, both top-of-the-line outfits from the land of the shamrock, and it is not any kind of Irish music they are playing, though it is plenty enough original. And I wonder when everything changed.
I would assume it changed when the Internet took hold and maybe it was so gradual that you could not put a real date on it. I assume that the passing of music past borders digitally changed listening habits of us all and maybe we have not lost but are losing the old cultures. Like television chipped away at the drawling accents of Southerners in The States and probably did for many of the culture pockets around the world. I knew a guy who worked in Japan for three years and for a couple of years after coming back talked English with the slightest change in his enunciation.
Which meant that the first couple of times I heard A True Ascension From the Wayward Path, I found it lacking anything I could recognize as Irish or even British. In fact, had I heard it blind, I would have said The States without hesitation.
Six songs make my point, each one sounding more Kentucky or California than County Cork or County Donegal, starting with the straight-ahead “Death Country,” the acoustic guitar, Dylan-esque harmonica and basic male/female voices giving no clue as to origin. Which leads into a slower and even more basic “Romance in Morphine,” sounding a lot like something Australia’s roots musician Bill Jackson might have written. Then into an upbeat but light “Brand New Day” and after that my favorite song on the mini-album/EP, “Home From the War,” the hook slow and emotional, the song full of meaning beyond just the lyrics, more Josh Ritter or Sam Morrow than anything else I can think of. “Not On My Side” floats over an acoustic guitar/strings road, reflective but somehow positive— and then rain and thunder which magically fades into an old hymn. Capping it off is a primo cover of Leadbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” which you may know better as “In the Pines” because most people are too lazy to go beyond the obvious (which in this case is obviously not).
This is pretty much as good as anything America can come up with, so what the hell? Americana it is, and well worth hearing.
And the video above? To really understand the music you should watch and listen to it. There is a story behind the songs. More than one, actually. And they make all the difference.
