Country-tinged anti-folk with amazing dark lyrics. At least as good as the Kimya Dawson I was drooling over recently. Also recalls Roky Erikson (but more coherent, better written and produced), Tom Waits (but less self-consciously down-and-out), or the Mekons (musically). Creative surprising percussion, straightforward acoustic guitars, with occasional appearances by accordion, vibraphone, piano, cello. The songs deal with leaving, dying, failing, and hoping. Male vocals with the sort of unobtrusive delivery that lets you focus on the AMAZING LYRICS. Almost every track is great, but track 11 is one of the best four things I’ve heard all year. FCC: 4.

Track 1: *Stirring dance hall percussion, menacing banjo, bluesy chanting vocals. Lyrics tell a disconnected story of discord and wrongdoing.
Track 2: **Angry folk feel. Lyrics progress from a life in disarray to a society in disarray, concluding “hope is all that we can do.” Abrupt ending.
Track 3: *A disaffected anti-folk anthem about disaffected youth: “but still you’re just a kid / you shouldn’t read Dostoyevsky at your age.”
Track 4: ***FCC: “I have been working all fucking day,” occurs just once and is really worth editing out. Begins with random room sounds. Softly stirring music, lyrics in the voice of an abusive parent. “You don’t belong where the humans eat. /You don’t belong, don’t belong to me.”
Track 5: ***Mellow bluegrass feel. Allusive lyrics about dying. Ends with sparse clapping.
Track 6: ***Far-away martial percussion and mellow country guitars. Awesome lyrics about a man who is just barely hanging on: “It is tempting to fight when you know that you’re right / It’s hard to lie down when you don’t trust the ground.”
Track 7: *Lugubrious cello, cloppy percussion, distant vocals.
Track 8: *Irregular soft rockabilly.
Track 9: *Nirvana-esque acoustic guitars. Lyrics sound like the rantings of a psychotic convenience store robber, or a rural Deliverance-esque gangster, Things start to rock out, in a menacingly mellow way that reminds me of the dance-floor scene in Pulp Fiction. Low melodic bass line.
Track 10: *A boppy tune that bears a certain resemblance to The Battle Hymn of the Republic performed by the Mekons. Lyrics about leaving: “Remember when we were young / And we could name the things we ran from.”
Track 11: ****Low chanted vocals, simple strummy guitars with great tension-creating chords. How can you not love a song that begins “I wanna be / better than oxygen?” Darkly, gently, hopeful, this almost made me cry.
Track 12: Lugubrious mumbling complaint about the modern world, or something, Possibly self-referential, but still not funny or interesting.

-Kathryn