Sunday, April 1, 2012

Music: The Cherry Blossums LP

Not everyone in Nashville is a sucker for that rustic, historic-gaze folk sound. I'm not. But Cherry Blossums only border that naivety-blessed semi-vacant genre/zone. Their zone is a non-archy, but settled, comfortable and understanding.

While dreadnaught guitar and harmonicas ramble away, underground tom-toms gallop and plod with an Almost-Eastern feel, rippling under the folks' songs above. And so the Folk convention is lulled into a deeply hipnotic, throbbing trestle.  Odd percussion and things like whistles and suddenly-remembered mandolins appear, and seem pleased, and take their leave. They run across the tracks. The band is constantly churning and buzzing beneath the unfettered minstrelism.

You're told to "Sell your love for rocks and stones... and money." All irony of course, then they warn about getting weighed down, and killed man. It's a lattice of Pure Goodnature. Rolling along, repeating.

"History shows agian and again, how Nature points out the folly of Man." I'm not sure if this is a theme in the film, Godzilla. It may well be. Whether it is or isn't, Cherry Blossums bend and mend their eco-psychic lyricism with a cover of Blue Oyster Cult's "Godzilla", a song loosely based on the film probably. They also cover-sort-of the Old Dirty Bastard at the begining of "Glow, Jesus, Glow", a song that pops rhythmically at first, then sort of dissolves in hippy-vamp whacked-outness and liquidity. Then the end of the song becomes a sort of revival: John Allingham's grunts like Tongues and Peggy Snow's flirty wailing becomes the wild-afro'd preacher. Glow!

Collaboratively released, thoroughly replayable Old Weird Nashville. Recomended!

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