Nightswimming #16: 09/26/24-10/03/24
Alt-country! D.C. pop-punk! And MORE!
Highly Recommend! (best of the week)
Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild - Merce Lemon (Darling Recordings)
I would be ready to declare 2024 the Year of Alt-Country, if I was certain that Alt-Country was the right genre label to use for some of the best releases of the year. From Waxahatchee’s Tigers Blood to Hurray for the Riff Raff’s The Past is Still Alive to MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks, indie rock is rallying around pedal steel guitars and twangy vocals. This sort of Wilco Tweedy-fied songwriting with Neil Young & Crazy Horse guitar solos is elevating alt-rock and folk together.
Merce Lemon’s Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild is an equally strong addition to the 2024 alt-country catalog.
Sonically, it evokes a certain rural warmth. A shotgun shack where the screen door slaps shut and the crickets raise a chorus to the unclouded stars. Lemon’s voice is a rich blend of the twangy Country Western of Emmylou Harris, and the edgy, gritty alt-rock of PJ Harvey. She grounds each track, delivering the lyrics a gentle lilt, but digging in and asserting herself when the band starts to rock. (Special aside shout-out to the pedal steel guitar stylings of Wednesday’s Xandy Chelmis, who is delivering some of the best performances of any musician in the world right now.) It’s just the right mix of upbeat rockers and thoughtful ballads.
Lyrically, Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild is classically folk. Lemon’s sense of humor interplays with a deeply affecting melancholy. On the opening track, Birdseed, she sings of becoming a bird in order to haunt a past lover—“My droppings land where you’re walking” and “I’m the bird that sings so goddamn loud, it wakes you up at dawn”. Backyard Lover is a haunting depiction of grief. The music builds and builds, and the release is Lemon repeatedly belting “Nothing’s good enough, you fucking liar.”
It's efficient, it rocks, and it pulls feelings out of you and forces you to examine them on the front porch at your own feet.
Highlights: Backyard Lover, Crow, Foolish and Fast
Highway Prayers - Billy Strings (Billy Strings/Reprise)
If you haven’t read Nightswimming’s coverage of Billy Strings Live Vol. 1 from earlier this year, that might be a good place to start with Strings’s whole…deal.
It’s important to understand the context of a former hillbilly turned bluegrass deity and his widely-hailed 3 hour jamgrass shows. But it’s just as important to understand that his studio work isn’t that. Like the great jambands before him (Phish, Grateful Dead, Allman Brothers Band) the live magic cannot be captured in the studio, so he doesn’t try to do that.
Instead what Highway Prayers does give is 20 absolutely solid and airtight tracks that span genres, all with the signature Billy Strings bluegrass flavor. There are plenty of straight-down-the-middle classic Vassar Clements style bluegrass tracks (Leaning on a Travelin’ Song, In the Clear, Cabin Song, to name a few) mixed in with jazzy instrumental explorations (Escanaba, Seney Stretch), laid back Psych rock chillers (Gild the Lily, Leadfoot), and an ode to marijuana constructed with flicking lighters and bubbling bongs (MORBUD4ME). Many of these tracks will be added to the quintet’s live repertoire, and likely take on exploratory lives of their own. But they aren’t just throwaway tracks meant to be jam vehicles. They’re thoughtful, rich, full tunes expertly executed by the Strings Quintet and a cast of other Country characters.
Besides Strings himself being one of the greatest flat-pickers of all time, and the dudes on fiddle, bass, banjo, and mandolin (Alex Hargraves, Royal Masat, Billy Failing, and Jarrod Walker, respectively) being razor sharp, the vocals are truly sublime. The album is bookended with 2 a’cappella performances, and I implore you to crank your speakers for them.
I typically preach a “less is more” approach to the number of tracks on albums, but I really do think all of the ideas on Highway Prayers deserve to be here. There’s really no waste, and I can’t wait to see how the songs evolve live.
Highlights: Gild the Lily, Escanaba, My Alice, Richard Petty
Worth a Listen! (good to very good)
Feeling Not Found - Origami Angel (Counter Intuitive Records)
A potent blend of pop-punk, emo, and math rock with infectious choruses and expert instrumentation. Feeling Not Found is Origami Angel’s 4th major project in 3 years, and that volume of production speaks to the urgency of this music.
The melodies are classic but entirely original. The riffs range from wildly heavy chug-a-lugging to precise harmonic wailing. The vocals are classically pop-punk and bring a ton of feeling to the duo’s heaviest thematic lyrics yet. Between Magdalena Bay’s Imaginal Disc and Feeling Not Found, albums about the terror of the internet are all the rage. Origami Angel joins Combat, Ekko Astral, and Bad Moves in proving that the DMV (D.C., Maryland, Virginia) area have a lot to say this year in the punk album world.
Highlights: Viral, Living Proof
R.I.P. Kris Kristofferson (June 22nd, 1936 - September 28th, 2024)
“I was a sailor
I was born upon the tide
And with the sea, I did abide
I sailed a schooner ‘round the Horn to Mexico
I went aloft and furled the mainsail in a blow
And when the yards broke off they said that I got killed
But I am living still”
In my mind Kris Kristofferson was like Burt Bacharach and Carole King. Legendary musicians in their own rite, but when you look at the list of songs they wrote for other people, you go “holy shit they wrote THAT too??”. In his day, musicians could buy mansions off the back of just one hit—Kristofferson penned about a half dozen. I mean, he wrote Me & Bobby McGee!!!
Kristofferson lived one of those lives that only men of his era could. A real Forrest Gump type. He was a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, an Air Force Major General, recorded 22 studio albums, starred in over 50 films, won a Golden Globe for Best Actor, and played in a band with Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Johnny Cash.
And if you haven’t read Ethan Hawke’s account of the time Kristofferson almost beat the piss out of Toby Keith, you simply must.
Here’s an extremely 1990 music video of The Highwaymen.