Cowpunk, Revisited: Anyone who thinks alt-country has suffered from an excess of delicacy and earnestness in the post-O Brother years can take heart: Two new upstarts are currently serving up authentic-ish approximations of classic cowpunk.
The New York five-piece O’Death (named for the folk standard popularized most recently by Ralph Stanley, which is a good start) are one of those bands who usually need to be seen live to be believed. Their new disc, Broken Hymns, Limbs And Skin (due out October 28 on Kemado Records), is whip-smart and utterly exhausting, and may be the only goth/country/thrash-folk disc you’ll ever need, at least until the next time X gets back together.
“Lowtide” by O’Death
O’Death’s tourmates, the Murfreesboro, Tennessee, all-female trio Those Darlins, serve up the perfect of mix ’20s nostalgia and ’80s revivalism suggestive of some alternate universe where all the women are Maria McKee and all the men are John Doe. Those Darlins haven’t released a debut disc yet, or even a debut single, but their early work suggests a mix of grit, pluck, three-part harmonies, and a charmingly awkward channeling of the Carter Family.
Rock The Vote, Sort Of: Like Okkervil River, Sufjan Stevens, and other wordy, self-consciously clever neo-folkies, the Decemberists have always been an acquired taste. Their new singles series “Always The Bridesmaid” features a totally pointless, incredibly irresistible ode to outed CIA agent Valerie Plame. Its lyrics aren’t particularly illuminating (“Valerie Plame/If that really is your name/I would just shout the same/To the world”), and it seems to have arrived three years after most people actually stopped caring about Valerie Plame. But it’s still maddeningly catchy, and its mere existence is a minor miracle, given that a baffling number of alt-country musicians even those who were politically active in ’04 have avoided anything topical this time out. (Heard about the election from Conor Oberst lately?). Most have ceded the ’08 field to hip-hop artists, who are doing a yeoman’s job of finding different words to rhyme with “Obama”:
Jay-Z’s “Lick A Shot For Obama”
Mainstream country artists have also mostly been MIA, with Hank Williams Jr. one of the lone exceptions. He recently reworked his hit “Family Tradition”, previously an ode to honky-tonks and pot smoking, into a clangingly awkward tub-thumper renamed “McCain-Palin Tradition”, with new lyrics sure to horrify the dozens of fans of the original. If you must, the clip can be found here, but really, don’t go there.
This Week in Johnny Cash: The confluence of the fifth anniversary of Johnny Cash’s death and the holiday release season has led to a bumper-crop of Cash issues and reissues, including several live DVDs, the Biography Channel documentary Johnny Cash’s America and the two-CD-plus-DVD 40th-anniversary set Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison, one of the few truly unmissable Cash collections of the past half-decade. The set features more than 30 unreleased tracks, including numbers from a little-known second show that took place at Folsom on the same day, and a version of “I’m Here To Get My Baby Out Of Jail” that was left off the original release because Cash messed up the words.
Random Goodness: Singer-songwriter Hayes Carll’s much-praised yet somehow still underrated “She Left Me For Jesus” now has a video to go with it, and it’s awesome. And also kind of terrifying, since Carll’s version of Jesus resembles a less hobo-like version of Devendra Banhart. Probably, this wasn’t intentional.
Hayes Carll “She Left Me For Jesus” official video
Todd Snider has been around for what seems like forever, wandering in and out (but mostly out) of public consciousness. His excellent new disc, Peace Queer, will be available for free download here until the end of the month, though pretty much every track on it (especially Snider’s collaborations with the mighty Patty Griffin on “The Ballad Of Cape Henry” and an atypically mellow cover of John Fogerty’s “Fortunate Son”) is worth paying for.
With their jangly guitars and harmonies so pretty they’re almost kind of girlie, Dallas band the New Frontiers sound like an updated version of the Jayhawks (not the sublime, early Jayhawks back when Mark Olson was still in the band, but their later, poppier period, when they were still really good). Their single “Black Lungs” is one of those vague and gorgeous songs that sounds like it’s about something very deep, even though it’s hard to tell just what. The centerpiece of the group’s new-ish disc Mending, it’s one of the best songs of the year.
It’s been out a year now, but recent events have made the three-disc catalogue of calamities People Take Warning!: Murder Ballads And Disaster Songs, 1913-1938 worth revisiting. Packed with tales of sadness, oppression, financial collapse, murder, and the occasional train wreck, most of which hail from the last Great Depression, it’s the perfect soundtrack to the next one.
