Michael Hurley – Ancestral Swamp

It’s a momentous occasion in Snock history: Folk singer Michael Hurley — Elwood Snock, to his friends — has released his 20th full album, his first for Devendra Banhart’s Gnomonsong label. Banhart’s enterprise, which he co-founded with Vetiver’s Andy Cabic, is an entirely suitable home for Hurley, whose eccentric, countercultural brand of folk music has long served as inspiration for the loose “New Weird America” movement of which Banhart is at the forefront.

The key to Hurley’s music is in the stark contrasts it embodies. In his reclusive yet oddly comforting world, the traditional and the unconventional sit side by side. Hurley sings mostly dark, sometimes gruesome tales of familiar-sounding misfits and outcasts, but he delivers them with an off-kilter, low-key charm that falls somewhere between avuncular and sinister (a range that’s not, perhaps, as wide as you might think).

“Knockando, what I dream of in the dark and bloody ground,” he croaks on the opening song, a lilting melody disguising more ominous concerns. The musical settings are spare, and they draw heavily on elements of Delta blues, old-time country, and Appalachian folk. There’s a bit of a gospel flavor on “Lonesome Graveyard”, a solo lament featuring Hurley on “electronic piano,” while Hurley’s creaking, cockeyed fiddle sets the tone for “Gambling Charley”, which sounds like a collision between Jimmie Rodgers and, well, Albert Hofmann. There’s also an eerily fractured reading of the age-old cowboy ballad “Streets Of Laredo”, along with a couple of characters from Hurley’s back catalogue, including the mysterious, minor-keyed “Light Green Fellow”, who first appeared on 1971’s Armchair Boogie.