Kentucky-born Brooklyn folk musician Matt Bauer’s latest album The Jessamine County Book Of The Living is a sort of Baroque prog-folk, verging at times on the avant-garde. Many of the songs are built around his spare banjo picking, which draws equally on his Kentucky roots and his love of Indonesian gamelan. For the most part the songs don’t so much tell stories as set scenes, living and vivid dioramas filled with imagery that’s often as dark as the minor keys in which they are played. That imagery is drawn from the natural world, although it is often at least equal parts fantasy and reality.
A perfect example is “White Lakes,” which begins and ends with the lines, “White Lakes in the mountains / my home, my home / they look the same as I left them / but they’re ruins in my heart / in my heart.”
Bauer, with bushy beard and shaved head, sings in a craggy baritone with a vocal effect that is sometimes a hard-edged vibrato and sometimes a crack between syllables. He and his banjo and occasional piano are backed by vocalists that include Jolie Holland, Angel Deradoorian and Mariee Sioux, and a small orchestra of strings, woodwinds and percussion.
The album’s opener, “Useless Is Your Armor,” begins with fingerpicked guitar that sounds for all the world like something off of Pentangle’s first album, before it turns into a mid-tempo march, full of Medieval imagery and metaphor. Like most of the songs, it doesn’t have a conventional verse-chorus-verse structure, but rather a scheme borrowed from various poetic forms. That’s also the case for “When I Was A Mockingbird,” a litany of verses in which the singer recalls being various denizens of the animal kingdom, from the titular mockingbird to an ant chasing mites through the “forest of feathers” on a heron’s body. One of the most intense tracks is “Blacklight Horses,” Bauer’s duet with Holland, with the repeated refrain of “Come with me, there is no more morning and no more night.”
A couple of the songs do have more conventional structures, and they stand out because of it. “Morning Stars” is a lovely Appalachian hymn played on country-style electric guitar, with the elegiac chorus of “Too long, too long for us / the hours until the morning comes / too long, too long for us / the hours until the morning stars.” And “Poplar Trees,” in which Bauer plays his banjo more like an Appalachian instrument than a gamelan, has an A-A-B-C blues structure over which bare-bones lyrics are stretched: “One-two-three went the leaves from the yard …”
Jessamine County is a short but intense album, its 10 songs ending with the dirge-like “Flowering Deer,” featuring multipart vocal harmonies backed solely by a string quartet. It’s eerily beautiful, like the rest of the album.
You can learn more at Bauer’s Web site or on Facebook.
(Crossbill, 2011)
Comments