ALBUM REVIEW: Yonder Mountain String Band Heads Somewhere Good on ‘Nowhere Next’
Henry Carrigan
Posted On November 6, 2024
Despite the title of Yonder Mountain String Band’s new album, Nowhere Next, they’re always headed somewhere, blazing new sonic trails and revisiting some familiar musical territory. For the album’s 11 songs (it’s their 11th album, as well), the band chases each other around the tablature with their fiddles, guitar, mandolin, banjo, and bass, slowing every now and then to ruminate on the nature of life.
The album opens with the jet-propelled bluegrass jam “The Truth Fits,” on which every player stretches out on his instrument through two instrumental bridges. On “Here I Go,” Dobro master Jerry Douglas (who joins the band for three songs total), unfurls a minor chord meditation on vulnerability, and Nick Piccininni’s mournful fiddle conveys the ambivalence of human emotion.
Ben Kaufmann’s supercharged bass thumping kicks off the album’s title track, setting the groove for the band’s swelling harmony vocals. Frenetic and psychedelic, the song’s spacy soundscape builds through anxiety of things to come.
Yonder Mountain String Band lays back on “Leave the Midwest,” rolling with carefree abandon—and name-checking the Grateful Dead and Nanci Griffith’s “Ford Econoline”—along this road song jam. Douglas takes the lead again in “Wasting Time,” and banjo and fiddle dart under and around each other on the old-time ballad “Outlaw.”
The album closes with a stirring blend of bluegrass and folk on the meditative “The River,” wherein cascading mandolin runs mimic the ever-tumbling currents of the river and of our lives.
Nowhere Next showcases the flawless musicianship of Yonder Mountain String Band, resulting in yet another gem of an album.
Yonder Mountain String Band’s Nowhere Next is out Nov. 8 on Thirty Tigers.
