Specs & Pricing

Music
Rock etc.
group’s full-length debut (an EP came out
last year), the music is as fun-loving as it is
seriously crafted. Constantly unpredictable
shifts of tempo and style merge guitars, bass,
drums, synths, keyboards, and a violin with
a trio of different vocalists. This delightful
wackiness never seems contrived or out of
place, but simply the only way it could be
done.
Although the music is seemingly
spontaneous, two years work and countless
hours of practice are said to have gone into
this release, which runs uninterrupted over
its 15 tracks. Interspersed between story-like
tunes such as “Andover,” “Fire, Burglary,
Flood,” and “Book of Baby Names” are
snippets of sound and conversation recorded
throughout the city—at the airport, an
elevated train, a party. “Pulling on Pigtails”
has a crazy, popcorn-popper sample that
sounds lifted from an old Tom-Tom Club
LP, while the lyrics mix social observations
with references to history.
Like the music, the disc is sonically all
over the map. Unlike most rock recordings,
the perspective here is slightly recessed,
starting someplace about a foot behind the
front baffle of the speakers. At times this
lends a more natural feel to instruments,
such as the drums, which take on more
depth perspective than one normally
hears. The mix is densely textured, awash
in bouncy synths, rich rhythm guitars, and
a strongly chugging bass line. And though
the soundstage is artificial, the soundscape
is vast and exciting.
While Bound Stems has an irrepressible
pop sensibility that encompasses a huge
range of genres, its music somehow
manages to come out sounding fresh, if not
always entirely original. One thing’s for sure,
though—jaded is one thing these guys are
not. Wayne Garcia
Further Listening: Fiery Furnaces:
Blueberry Boat; The Subways:
Young For Eternity
Willie Nelson:
Songbird.
Ryan Adams, producer. Lost
Highway 693902 (CD and LP).
Willie Nelson doesn’t always sound fully
engaged on his recent recordings, but he’s
so affable a presence and so savvy a singer,
he can almost make a Rob Thomas song
154 December 2006 The Absolute Sound
palatable. Songbird, though, finds Nelson
fully engaged—laidback, but in the moment
and savoring it. His “Rainy Day Blues” gets
the affair off to a bluesy, boozy start. A tip
of the hat goes to producer Ryan Adams,
who brought in his edgy Cardinals band to
back Nelson (whose only “family” member
on this long player is harmonica maestro
Mickey Raphael) and wrote a song (“Blue
Hotel”) especially for the artist.
The Cardinals play with a twangy, sludgy
drive, a band on a mission, and its thick
wash of fuzzed-out guitar, gospel organ,
evocative pedal steel, and occasional gospel
choruses conjure the feel of something at
stake, resulting in Willie digging deep for
vocal nuance. He reprises a couple of his
own gems from the catalogue (including a
lovely, country tear-jerking treatment of “Sad
Songs and Waltzes” from Shotgun Willie),
treats Jerry Garcia-Robert Hunter’s “Stella
Blue” as a sad, achingly beautiful torch
song (complete with Adams punctuating
the lament with stabs of jangling, howling
guitar protestations), and brings Brechtian
drama to Leonard Cohen’s venerated
“Hallelujah,” simply by copping character
from Cohen’s own desiccated reading.
“Amazing Grace” is reimagined for the
first time in recent memory, not as a gospel
celebration of redemption but rather as an
ominous, surging, ironic blues ballad that
would be right at home in a blood-spattered
scene from one of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti
westerns.
At no point does Adams call attention to
himself in the way Jack White did when he
produced Loretta Lynn’s remarkable Van
Lear Rose. Instead, Adams speaks through the
melancholy beauty of “Blue Hotel,” and via
a soundscape that is a well-balanced palette
of resonant pedal-steel moans supplemented
by note-perfect harmonica embellishments,
periodic electric guitar commentary, and a
discreet, right-there rhythm section.
If Adams and Nelson never cross each
other’s paths again, what they’ve left behind
does right by the latter’s formidable legacy.
David McGee
Further Listening: Loretta Lynn: Van
Lear Rose; The Byrds: Dr. Byrds &
Mr. Hyde
Chris Thile: How
To Grow a Woman
From the Ground.
Thile, producer. Sugar Hill 4017.
At the ripe ol’ age of 25, Chris Thile has
taken his fans on some kind of journey,
both with Nickel Creek and especially on
fascinating solo projects on which he has
challenged himself by pairing with seasoned
virtuosos on the order of Mike Marshall,
Bela Fleck, Edgar Meyer, Byron House, and
Jerry Douglas—be it doing a scintillating
one-man-band show (2004’s Deceiver) or,
on the album here, fronting a relatively
unknown bluegrass quartet and again testing
the genre’s progressive boundaries.
Thile hails How to Grow a Woman from
the Ground—the folkish title song about an
obsessive love is from L.A.-based singersongwriter,
Tom Brosseau (review, Issue
156) whom Thile is right to champion—as
his return to pure bluegrass, but he offers
an expansive definition of the form. His
original songs are cut from familiar cloth:
an instrumental breakdown that is both
traditional and progressive (the showcase
of fleet-fingered picking, “Watch ’at
Breakdown”) and somber, winsome tales
of splintered love affairs, the dissolution
of which he sees as magnifying his own
shortcomings as a companion, so much so
that when he opens himself up to a new
possibility in “I’m Yours If You Want Me,”
his acute fatalism leaves no room for the
song to be anything other than the spare
dirge it is.
Lightening up a bit, he brings rootsy
grandeur to Jack White’s recondite “Dead
Leaves and the Dirty Ground,” casting it as
a stomping, bluesy entreaty. And on Julian
Casablancas’ “Heart In a Cage,” he hears
a gospel cry where others might find only
petulance. Recorded in live takes around a
pair of mics, the music jumps out of the
speakers. The passion emanating from the
vibrant, cleanly articulated instrumental
solos and dialogues is near palpable (and