Have we forgotten about folk? Two years ago, the clear choice for album of the year was "Illinois". There were standouts (in some case classics) from My Morning Jacket, Okkervil River, Andrew Bird, and Bright Eyes. Since then, the tide seems to have favoured pop and dance. Even Will Sheff and Sam Beam have turned to injecting rock and pop into their releases this year. The exuberance of 2005 has faded. The music community (the NME excepted, per usual) has stopped making up genres: what happened to "Baroque folk", "freak folk", and "psych folk"?
Holler, Wild Rose!, a group with far too much punctuation in their name for comfort, seem to have the answer. You want folk? They're give you folk, goddamnit. By the truckload. By the effing truckload. 12 tracks, 1.1 hours of it. When iTunes measures album length in hours, not minutes, I get worried. This is an album that calls for an intermission (I recommend lifting the needle during a slow moment in Godspeed!-length "Poor In Spirit"). I suppose this was planned for with the three "Selahs", but I'm a sucker for ambient Sigur Ros tracks.
After toying with Godspeed and Sigur Ros references, I really ought to consummate this genre pronouncement. Holler, Wild Rose! have more or less created "post-folk" and in every possible sense. This is the music Sufjan would make 50 years from now. The closest parallel for this album I can find is "The Rescue" by Explosions in the Sky. Witness the chiming electric guitars, colossal drums, glorious backing vocals, and occasional glockenspiel. This is very much the album Explosions should have done this year.
H,WR! put their own stamp on post-rock with John Moloskie's bluesy lead vocals a la Broken Social Scene or Cold War Kids, banjo, Wurly, and pedal steel guitar. Each song starts from an acoustic or banjo folk/blues base and, usually propelled by Ryan Smyth's drumming, builds into a layered guitar progsplosion. The most complex arrangement that they manage to pull off successfully is "Captive Train", which recalls a live version of an obscure Led Zeppelin song. Longer and more complex songs, with more than one dramatic peak, tend to strain the ear. The album also ends fairly weakly, with the third slow instrumental track drifting into the anemic "Promise Braid". Even the longer and wispier songs don't really reduce the album's cohesion, though. Our Little Hymnal should tide you over until Explosions in the Sky grow up or Sufjan releases California-The Golden State Rocks sometime this millenium.
8.1/10.0
-RJR
No comments:
Post a Comment