Four Songs: The High Lonesome Sound, 2010
It would be pointless for me to fake airy detachment regarding Portland, Oregon-based The Lonesomes. The band’s drummer has been my best friend since our Reagan-era high school days. I’ve known two of the remaining three members since the late ’80′s. I really enjoy just about everything they’ve recorded, so when the lads take time to drop a 4-song EP (can I still use that term in this iTunes era?) an attentive, nostalgic listen is in order.
The says-what-it-is/is-what-is-says Four Songs offers features teasers from an upcoming album, the intriguingly-titled There’s No Denying Josephine. If the sample is representative of the larger whole then speed the day, gentlemen; the band’s latest work represents Exhibit #1 in the virtue of long-term collaborative musical relationships, a strong immediately-identifiable core sound augmented by touches of sonic and lyric ambition, combining to make their own space in the vast tracts of Americana-style music. Nicely done, guys. And for my readership…all available on iTunes for a most reasonable price. Put your money where your mouth is regarding home-grown labor-of-love music, people, and drop them some coin!
Much like it’s holiday-card-exchanging relatives the blues, the instantly-empowering “let’s write a song NOW” framework provided by Americana to its devotee bands can turn trap in a karmic instant. What sounds rootsy and authentic on album #1 of a band’s catalog turns to cliche quickly by album #3. The challenge to bands wanting staying power in this space is to find someway to make everyone’s Americana their own Americana, something with their unique musical fingerprint while not becoming some oddball pastiche of incompatible styles. Their are many bands, great and humble, that have done one Americana album worth a listen; that list drops dramatically when asked for a second, or third, or so on. Whether a conscious decision or not, the integration of style and sound ranging beyond the No Depression back-yard picket fence is the single most impressive accomplishment on 4 Songs, to the band’s lasting credit.
This push into Further Musical Places is immediately evident in the Beatle-esque keyboards and chiming/droning guitar figures opening “Western Town” and continuing into Phil Favorite’s ethereal voice backed by classic guitar/piano with the most ghostly of harmony tracked alongside, Mark Dybvig’s muscular guitar leads popping through every so often, the whole assemblage floats hazily as it relays the narrative of a lights are on but everyone’s been shipped out hamlet on the edge of quiet desperation (“kissing cousins” will not mean quite the same thing to me as it did before.) A bigger, more dispassionate canvas than the familiar self-focused narratives trod in the past, it’s a great opening gambit for the disk, familiar yet ambitious at the same time.
Moving right along, the band heads back into classic chord-driven Byrd-land on “Heaven”. Dybvig takes a turn on vocals here and the contrast between his throaty leads and Favorite’s thinner, purer vocal instrument is dramatic, providing a complete stylistic contrast and one which probably works great in the band’s live sets. Longtime collaborator Jeff Helgeson adds solo trumpet; nice to hear him still in harness with the group.
Next up is “Helping Hands”, the most “classic” Lonesome’s sounding of the four tracks, musical ground they’ve been covering since Circling the Sun, but again showing a bit of push out of comfortable quartet-sound, evidenced best by Garth Hudson-esque organ fills. As should be apparent by now, the tasteful (and that’s the only word I can think of) use of keyboards throughout the disc is a revelation; capable guest fills by Chris Hubbard and Dustin Dybvig broaden the underlying ideas just beautifully. (And, yes, Dustin is Mark’s son…that, friends, is called strategic use of your network.)
“Throw Away” closes the set, a dreamy stumble-about filled with pedal steel and more organ, shoved around periodically by hiccups of rumbling guitar and bass, featuring one of Favorite’s better lyric images (“Throw the baby out, keep the bath water/You’re going to need to wash the dirt”) closing with a long, energetic lead by Dybvig.
You’ve heard it all before…and yet you haven’t, at least not quite the way The Lonesomes are doing it here, and that’s tres cool. Mark Zehr and Robyn Hercey remain the assertive but reliable rhythmic pulse they’ve provided the band for years. The dual-guitar attack is as solid as ever, chiming and energetic. They all Know What They Know and do it well, and could be doing it Lonesome-style for the next 20 years if they wanted to. The little touches, the organ, the various keyboards, the sneeze-and-you-miss-em tastes of non-genre harmonic progressions and two-bar meter breaks scattered hither-and-yon spice the stew and keep it fresh; the best compliment that can be paid them is that, after a while, you start wondering what you’re going to hear and when, almost like a “Where’s Waldo” picture drawn by Uncle Tupelo. And that’s a compliment; most bands in this place never realize that all this music is opportunistically assembled, cobbled together by its original practitioners from styles, sounds and subjects they happened to have lying around the house. It’s a style that begs for personal adaption and the Lonesomes have gigged, together and separately, long enough now to know this, as a result trying their best to put their own coat of paint on the assemblage.
Quibbles are minor. The generally excellent mixing shows some occasional leveling inconsistencies, all with the supporting instruments. I expect this to be cleaned in the final product and, truthfully, if that’s the only criticism I can offer, I’m picking at nits and know it. I do continue awaiting the single in which Zehr and Hercey get to show the world their considerable chops (and, having heard both play live for years, trust me, the chops are real and present) beyond that of rock-solid bass-and-drums; c’mon guys, even Ringo got a riffy fill once or twice!
But those are spit in the ocean. I like this a lot, will probably like it a lot more later this year when the buffet is fully stocked, and there’s no denying that.
