CD Odyssey Disc 1029: Shovels and Rope

I’ve had a lovely weekend hanging with my wife, chilling out and watching Wimbledon. Yesterday I watched one my favourite players, Garbine Muguruza, win the women’s final. When I’m done this review I’m going to go see if my favourite men’s player of all time, Roger Federer, can add to his legend.

On the musical front I followed through on my threat of buying a bunch of metal music on Friday, adding albums by King Diamond, Cirith Ungol, Iron Maiden, Opeth, Ghost and Type O Negative to the collection. I also found indie folk albums by Julie Miller and Josh Ritter I’d been looking for. After all, man does not live by metal alone.

Disc 1029 is…Self-Titled

Artist: Shovels and Rope

Year of Release: 2008

What’s up with the Cover? A dove having a good day and a cow having a bad one.

How I Came To Know It: I was originally introduced to the band by my friend Justin, but this particular album was me digging through their back catalogue. You can’ buy this album on CD separately. It only comes as an insert with the record. This annoyed me, but I overcame. I bought the record for $30, opened it and took out the CD and then sold the record back to the same clerk for $14. So basically, I got the CD for $16, which is what I would have paid anyway.

How It Stacks Up:  I have three Shovels and Rope albums. This one is pretty awesome, but it falls just short of 2014’s “Swimmin’ Time” (reviewed back at Disc 978). I’ll put it in second place overall.

Ratings: 3 stars but almost 4

Shovels & Rope self-titled debut album shows that husband and wife team Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent knew exactly what kind of music they wanted to make from the beginning. All the elements they would refine on “Swimmin’ Time” six years later are here: sublime harmonies, knee-slapping rhythms and a talent for keeping things sparse and real.

Indie folk can sometimes steer unpleasantly into detached irony, where a band is too self-aware that they are making ‘old timey’ music, and intent on letting us in on the joke rather than feeling the music down deep. Shovels & Rope keep it real, and their love of the rich tradition of Americana comes across crisp and clear. On “Mexico” they even have a verse where a lover is saying their partner can go, but they’ll have to leave the music collection behind:

I won't let you leave, I won't let you leave
Not with all my Django, Emmylou and Steve
I won’t let you leave, I won't let you leave
Not with my Revival tucked down in your sleeve
If you're gonna go, take the ones you gave to me all the way to Mexico”

Ah, the division of the music collection after a break up. If it were my I wouldn’t part with my Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle or Gillian Welch’s “Revival” (bonus points if you caught that one) but I might let Django Reinhardt go. I like it but I almost never put it on.

But I digress…

The band plays crisp and clear throughout, with every word enunciated and lots of space in the sparse production to let their voices shine. Most of the singing is done in harmony - often loose, sometimes tight – but always emotionally evocative.

If anything this first record is more raw and real than later releases, with many songs with just vocal and one or two instruments. “Magdelina” is a guitar, a banjo and a splash of tambourine, with each one having lots of room to stand out and add its dimension to the song. On “Can’t Hardly Stand It” the biggest non-vocal element are hand claps, but that’s all it needs to work its magic. All that empty space leaves lots of room for the vocals to resonate and sink in.

The songs have the steady roll of trains, cars and landscapes filled with distance, all used to underscore the hard-scrabble lives of the characters making their way in the world. “Boxcar” features a man bleeding out after a crime spree gone wrong, and “Gasoline” is a town dying just as painfully.

On “1,200 Miles” the slow death is a relationship. Here the distance is not only the backdrop to the scene, but an active antagonist driving two people apart. And the rapid fire delivery of lines like:

“If you wanna love me baby then I wish you would

‘cause I woke up feeling like damaged goods

And I learned to live with the consequence

Of hanging my heart on your barbed-wire fence”

Underscores the urgent need to fix things on the home front before it is too late.

There are bluesy elements on the album as well, that are what the White Stripes might have sounded like if they unplugged and went folk. These songs I like less, but the way they dig in helps to provide a counterpoint to the campfire sing-a-long feel of the other songs. They ground the album with some well-placed grit.

This album was a thoroughly enjoyable listen and although relatively new to my collection is going to get a lot of play in the months and years ahead.

Best tracks: Gasoline, Boxcar, Magdelina, 1200 Miles, Build Around Your Heart a Wall, Mexico

CD Odyssey Disc 978: Shovels and Rope

Today I finally made it back to the gym. After months of relative inactivity, my body feels like it is falling apart, and at age 47 it probably is. Sure I get in a brisk 45 minute walk home five days a week, but that’s just basic maintenance at this point.

Atrophy is a harsh mistress, and if you don’t want her pushing you around, you’ve got to do something about it. I’m not saying a single day at the gym is going to give me the title, but at least I won a round before the fight was over.

Disc 978 is…Swimmin’ Time

Artist: Shovels & Rope

Year of Release: 2014

What’s up with the Cover? If you get thrown one of these, then ‘swimmin’ time’ hasn’t gone well.

How I Came To Know It: My friend Justin introduced me to Shovels & Rope one night and I really liked their sound. I went out and picked up this album shortly thereafter.

How It Stacks Up:  I only have two Shovels & Rope albums. “Swimmin’ Time” is #1.

Ratings: 4 stars

Never underestimate the power of simple music. “Swimmin’ Time” is a master class in how much you can accomplish with some pretty harmonies, an infectious beat and something to say.

Shovels & Rope (argh…ampersand) is a folk duo comprised of husband and wife team Michael Trent and Cary Ann Hearst. For a duo they move a lot of air, and a big part of the magic is how focused they are on beat and rhythm. “Swimmin’ Time” has foot stompin’, hand clappin’ and infectious, anticipatory drum beats. The couple let their vocals carry the melody, and the other instruments are locked in step with the drum so much that their main impact is to add oomph.

If you’re looking for thoughtful guitar picking or complex strum patterns, look elsewhere. I am usually looking for those things, but this record does what it does so well I never missed them.

Neither Trent nor Hearst are powerhouse vocalists but because of how they approach their music it doesn’t matter. Their harmonies are sometimes so loose they sound almost like a duet, and sometimes they are so tight they’re like a single person. Whatever structure they’re using, they have a great sense of timing, and how to make the natural beat of a song serve the story they’re telling. They both have a rough edge to their singing styles, and it gives all that artful harmony have a bit of grit you don’t often hear in this style of singing. The experience is like sitting around a campfire, feeling a sense of community and a confidence that you could join in anytime and not offend a soul.

The album opens with “The Devil is All Around” which begins as a sweet and sorrowful a capella, before a drum beat kicks in and the duo sing:

“I got wasted and I sat around the fire all day

See if I could find someone to make love to

And I barely even noticed how the fibers did tear away

From the fabric of my being

But nobody knows it like you do, babe

Nobody knows it like you do

The lengths we will go to.”

They hit that “I got wasted” line with a fervor that lets you know they’ve been there. The rest of the line is all harmony, but feels like a single narrator. It’s just that this narrator has got so much pain to share it takes two voices just to get it out.

“The Devil Is All Around” is just one of several songs on the record that thematically explore our relationship with evil – and by evil Shovels & Rope are talking about that voice in people encouraging them to do bad things. This record is filled with people hitting their kids, burning bridges and turning to drugs, all the while knowing each step forward is just another step in the wrong direction.

But there is fun on the record as well, including a couple of sweet fishing songs (“Fish Assassin” and “Stono River Blues”). Both evoked childhood memories of shore casting on the local lakes around the small town I grew up. Sometimes I miss that.

On any record where two people are so perfectly expressing a single thought with two voices, it is only appropriate that they explore how our actions impact one another. This is expertly explored on the love song “Mary Ann & One Eyed Dan” (argh…ampersand) and the more emotionally complicated “Pinned.”

The album ends with the haunting tale of the tragic loss of the USS Thresher, a submarine that was lost to the ocean’s depths with all hands on board in 1963. Just like Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” it is a story of a nautical disaster that I would never have known without someone who took the time to immortalize the struggle in a song. Damn folk music is awesome.

There are some songs on this record that feel a bit hokey, and because of that I was originally going to give it a three out of five. Also their gratuitous use of the lazy and semi-literate ampersand didn’t help.

Instead a busy weekend delayed the review to the point that I got a full six listens in before I was able to sit down and share a few words about what I thought. During this time I never once got tired of hearing these songs – even the hokey ones. Hoke and ampersands be damned; a good record has staying power, and this record has it.

Best tracks: The Devil Is All Around, Pinned, Stono River Blues, Mary Ann & One-Eyed Dan, Thresher