Beautiful, precise, poignant and poetic new folk numbers inspired by the life and music style of Woody Guthrie as the Portland, Oregon and New Yorker, now Portland, Maine-based singer-songwriters bring a delicious duet album, alternating and sharing songs covering a variety of forever topical social issues. It’s a follow-up to their 2018 EP, Among Horses III. After Heynderickx’s gorgeous last album, 2024’s Seed of a Seed, this new release again finds their voices mix perfectly, sometimes taking the writing and lead between or within songs, or with complementary backing harmonies. Some come in a gentle waltz time with lovely acoustic finger-picking, but the consistency, clarity, ease and crisp delivery only serves to bring out the gentle power of each. Conover’s opener Alicia is a tribute number to Alicia Rodriguez, one of several Puerto Rican social activist political prisoners who was arrested in 1980 at the age of 26, and sentenced to an extraordinary 85 years for no apparent crime, finally released in 1999 thanks to years of justic compaigns, and then last-minute clemency from then US president Bill Clinton. As the song mentions: “Alicia was put into prison / No trial or charge or conviction / Her crime was living the one way there is / And that’s screaming to get the tape off your lips.” Heynderickx’s opener The Marketer is a beautiful swing-time, number about commercialism and identity. Boars is a sensual, dream-like number where the pair’s fast vocals combine with clever, rich, dense, vivid almost concrete poem lyrics: “Ring it out slow ring it high make it glow like the crickets in the telephone haze / Stag shape runaway busted bumper palisade synchronized sinusoidal waves.”
The over-riding theme is to question the nature of what it is be be American and subtly questions what has happened to the US in more recent times. Conover’s Cowboying, in the persona of a outlaw character in the harsh wilderness, addresses this with lines such as “Well here's what I'll say if the sun now is setting / If the home of the brave is a joke I'm just getting.” In Bulosan’s Words (after the Filipino-American novelist and poet and union activist) sees them share the vocals: “I learned that poverty is normal, / I learned the language hurts my tongue / I learned the jobs are scarce like cutlery and sharp as hunger to my stomach.” In phrasing and style, throughout the album this is very much in the Guthrie spirit of justice and folk protest, but Fluorescent Light address and more modern tech-related social problem: “There was an ancient light / There was an ancient song / Now something isn’t right Now we live in fluorescent light / They sold it as a muffin / They sold it on TV / They sold it as a tabloid just to try to get the best of me.” Two other gems addressing modern identity in different ways are the gorgeous This Morning I Am Born again and to each their dot, the latter with flute and a wonderful shuffle beat. A truly gorgeous release that’s set in a traditional style, but is timelessly relevant. Out on Fat Possum Records.
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