Mint Mile has been an active concern for going on a decade now, but the build has been slow: Three promising EPs were finally followed by a sweeping full-length that dropped the week after the bottom dropped out on reality and the pandemic began. Ambertron was a grand triumph in a year that did its best to stifle such art, but its casual, communal air felt out of sync in a year where easy connection was impossible. Like time and those of us that survived, however, the band has moved on. Those changes are well processed and documented on the appropriately titled Roughrider.
The best place to start with Roughrider might be right at the end with “I Hope It’s Different.” The alt-country ensemble SIlkworm’s Tim Midyett has been writing for and helming with the steady assistance of bassist Matthew Barnhart, guitarist Justin Brown and drummer Jeff Panall is here led by Nina Nastasia on vocals instead — an acclaimed songwriter in her own right whose “That’s All There Is” Silkworm covered way back in 2003. Nastasia looks optimistically to what comes next as she sings “I hope it’s different / Not just another good time / Insulated by uncomfortable lies” set to the band’s twangy slow dance and given added flourish by Poi Dog Pondering’s Susan Voelz organization of the strings. It’s like opening a window and walking outside, the promise of fresh air and a new environment before you after Midyett’s scrawling shifts and meandering moods.
That doesn’t mean “I Hope It’s Different” is the best song here, exactly. Mint Mile has taken up the mantle of the kind of unspooling Americana Jason Molina used to excel at so well, which is a funny thing to say given Roughrider’s brevity relative to Ambertron. Even so, the band is firing on all cylinders here regardless of track length; “Interpretive Outlook” does every bit as much with its sub-three-minute runtime as “Brigadier” does pushing eight. The breadth of musicianship is on full display and Midyett’s songwriting expands or contracts to fit the music as needed; his roughened, unsparing delivery had me recalling early Jets to Brazil and Lucero.
But perhaps even more so than Ambertron, this is a record about community. To wit: The band shines brightest when the core four are accompanied, which is almost always. The fluid grace of Brown’s pedal steel guitar and Barnhart and Panall’s anchoring rhythm section never sounds better than when there’s just a little something extra — Susan Voelz’s violin, say, or Alison Chesley’s cello. I was disappointed to discover frequent associate Howard Draper did not bring back the “magic spackling thing” as a credit from Ambertron, but nevertheless, his piano, organ and lap steel guitar frequently add a magic touch where an otherwise strong song could’ve settled. There’s Corvair’s Heather Larimer lending vocal assistance on “Empty Island.” And for Silkworm fans, “Halocline” and “S c ent” each feature Joel R.L. Phelps on saxophone. You could write out the whole list of credits for how many contributors are worth noting and for how much they add to make such a satisfying record.
As with Ambertron, though, the best songs on Roughrider happen when Mint Mile piles on the people in a gradually growing jam that stretches the band’s legs. Mirroring “The Great Combine” and “Amberline,” “S c ent” and “Brigadier” probably started as simple singer-songwriter sketches but grew into enormous, swooning spins. MIdyett appropriately struggles on “Brigadier” to hit an attempt at his highest registers as he sings “Can’t overcome the life we made” while the strings skitter and Panall’s percussion finally brings the band to a crashing finish, where Draper’s pulsing, spirit-cleansing organ takes you out. It’s a real thing of beauty.
The whole album and band — really, we should be more generous and call them a collective — is a thing of beauty. Once again, Mint Mile has delivered music with weathered emotional complexity that retains an open-ended sense of optimism that, maybe from now on, the ride won’t be so rough. How easy it is to fall for that kind of burdened but unbeaten perspective.
Whether singles or groups, new or old, jazz or rock, 7"s or digital-only releases, or any number of other boxes you could wish to check, this installment of our Dust column probably has it. Bill Meyer, Jennifer Kelly, Derek Taylor, and Ian Mathers contribute short reviews on everything from long-toiling Oregonian saxophonists to bedroom producers from Ontario. Acts include Donovan Quinn, Moon Duo, Eye, DenMother, Crystal Myslajek, The Urge Trio, Mint Mile, and the Rich Hally 5.
Donovan Quinn—Dad Was Buried In His Leather Jacket 7” (Soft Abuse)
So you say you love vinyl? It’s one thing to extol the virtues of a broad black long player, but quite another to embrace the medium in its most concentrated form—the multi-song 33 rpm 7”. Donovan Quinn proves his love on four-song EP by glorying in the sonic squashedness that comes from cutting 13 minutes into 14 inches and then making said minutes so catchy that you’ll play it over and over, thus guaranteeing imminent decay. Backed by buds from 200 Years and Skygreen Leopards, he returns to the casual pop lope that he toned down in favor of country introspection on his last full-length solo record, Honky Tonk Medusa. Since Nikki Sudden is otherwise engaged, Dan Treacy remains a convalescent, and David Kilgour’s taking his time, it falls to Quinn to argue the merits of this stuff. Don’t fight him; he’s got four good answers right here.
The first of two in a set for 2017, Occult Architecture Vol. 1 plumbs the mind-cracking properties of gnostic repetition. Like Ripley Johnson’s other project, Wooden Shjips, Moon Duo employs tight circling riffs of guitar and drums to crack through expectations. “Cold Fear” hammers relentlessly at a four-note riff, a catch like a heart murmur syncopating its inexorable forward motion; you can’t listen without paranoia, claustrophobia angst, and yet the airy vocals, the throbbing synthetic keyboards (that’s the other half of the duo, Sanae Yamada) murmur of escape. Most times, Moon Duo seems to distill whole rock songs into a single measure, refracted into a million repetitions as through a funhouse mirror.“Creepin’” vamps a blues rock riff into oblivion, transforming heat and friction and diesel dust into something otherworldly. Only “White Rose” is given the room to stretch its limbs, unfurling in distended guitar scrawls and buzzing drone, past measures that spin by like telephone polls on a long haul towards the horizon.
Jennifer Kelly
Eye—Other Sky (Ba Da Bing)
While New Zealanders can’t really claim a lock on free form noise rock, they sure know how to do it right. Eye has lineage on its side; drummer Peter Stapleton has played in Dadamah and the Terminals (caveat – my old label Roof Bolt put out a Terminals record 20 years ago, but no, I can’t sell you one), guitarist Peter Porteous in Empirical, and synthesist Jon Chapman in Rory Storm and the Invaders. But it’s what they do with their heritage that makes this stuff register. “Tension Cue” starts things off with a juggernaut of forward driving beats and low register rumble that sounds rather like someone listened to Mission Of Burma’s cover of “Heart Of Darkness” and said “this is nice, but a bit too cluttered,” and then set about making things right. “Black Lightning,” on the other hand, layers sizzling percussion, butterfly electronics, and guttural fuzz into a remorseless build-up and discharge of energy. With music like this, longer is better; the tracks that work less well are the ones without room to stretch.
Bill Meyer
DenMother—Blood: A Memoir (Self-Release)
Blood: a memoir | 2016 by DenMother
Canadian electronic singer-songwriter DenMother spent much of this decade under the radar amassing what was quietly one of the most impressive oeuvres out there. But along with geographical changes (Toronto to the Maritimes, most prominently) and personal turmoil, she pulled her work down and went into hibernation. Luckily the end of last year saw a return, with edited versions of older releases once again on her Bandcamp account and this new release, giving an account of a difficult year. As always the production is somehow lushly minimalist, hazy and harrowing, with DenMother’s frequently echoed and distorted vocals weaving in and around its surroundings. Blood: A Memoir is definitely a welcome return for those of us who have been following her work, but it also makes a fine starting point for the uninitiated. Here’s hoping for more this year.
Ian Mathers
Crystal Myslajek—Circadia LP (Water Wing)
Circadian rhythms are the 24-hour cycles that we enact or disrupt as we go through our days or louse up by jumping time zones. But what do you get when you drop the n? Is Circadia a place? Sure sounds like it, but I defy you to find it on a map. The act of making something new with a small omission corresponds quite nicely to the act of making a new song that someone might, against the tides of nostalgia and glut, actually want to hear. Crystal Myslajek mines a very different vein here than she did a couple years back with the trio Brute Heart. She plays piano and coos a few syllables across the six tracks on this LP; somber and ruminative, her keyboard figures bring to mind Peter Jefferies c. Last Great Challenge in a Dull World. Bolstered by a hint of brushes on drums and the very occasional swell of a bowed string or a twisted synth knob, Myslajek’s music evokes an icy, late-night vibe that offers a clue to the album’s name and acknowledges one of music’s powers — to freeze a day.
Bill Meyer
The Urge Trio—Live at the Hungry Brain (Veto)
Snapshot of a single musical set recorded at Chicago, October of 2015, Live at the Hungry Brain teams Swiss reedist Christopher Erb with reedist Keefe Jackson and cellist Tomeka Reid, two of the city’s vanguard improvisers. Erb and Jackson overlap on tenor saxophone with each bringing secondary horns to stage as well. A vibrant and vacillating contest of conflating and contrasting tones and textures ensues for much of the 33-minute duration. Dry and bristling reed pops percolate with brittle pizzicato. Overtones and harmonics born of pursed embouchures and cantilevered strings float and flitter in the air like bio-luminescent fireflies. Jackson’s bass clarinet takes on the moistly gurgling properties of an amphibian pond dweller while Erb mimics the loquacious faux-speech of a tree-perched avian of unknown origin on soprano. Vintage European free improvisation is an obvious antecedent with a section mid-performance where Erb almost sounds like Brötzmann in his coarse, leather-lunged cadence, but any semblance of imitation ultimately seems incidental. These are three players comfortable in a common musical tongue derived from the moment and separate from any established language.
Derek Taylor
Mint Mile—The Bliss Point (Comedy Minus One)
The Bliss Point by Mint Mile
The late, great Silkworm continues to spin out offshoots, first the wonderful but (understandably) morbid Bottomless Pit, now Mint Mile, which is just as raucous and wounded, but somewhat less constrained by personal history. Both Tim Midyett and Andy Cohen play prominent roles in the project; Midyett’s reedy tenor, plus the layers and layers of six-string sound, give a strong whiff of Silkworm. But there are other players, too, Matthew Barnhart and Howard Draper from Tre Orsi, Jeff Panall of Songs:Ohia and Justin Brown of Paillard. Four of six of participating musicians play some variety of guitar, at least part of the time. “City of Speed Traps” blisters and roars with a quintessentially late-1990s heaviness, taking its slow time to let dissonance and distortion bloom, while “Bellflower” flirts with country rock in its acoustic and lap steel (that’s Draper) tones, though a very loud variety of it. “Park,” the best of the lot, rattles its cage with a kind of flannel-shirted, five-o’clock- shadowed belligerence in line with another Chicagoan guitar band, Eleventh Dream Day; its clanking bass line and slashing guitars convey pure hurting resilience (“Whatever gets you by,” indeed.) The four-song EP closes with “Youngold,” a mostly acoustic outing, lit by lovely arcs of steel guitar (Justin Brown this time), but while quieter, the song aches with urgency. Lifers all, still at it, and it still matters.
Jennifer Kelly
Rich Halley 5—The Outlier (Pine Eagle)
“Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” Clint Eastwood was talking about frontier justice, not jazz, when he uttered those words in Unforgiven, but they still apply to folks like Rich Halley. Pushing 70, he’s an authoritativetenor saxophonist who writes sturdy tunes and holds together a band that grasps his concepts. He’s done the work to build an audience, playing small joints in the Oregon woods and for a number of years organizing the Penofin Jazz Festival, which brought folks like Fred Anderson and Tony Malaby to the Pacific Northwest. But living in Oregon never elevated any jazz musician’s profile, so no matter how much good work he does he seems not to get much notice. Will it mean much to you to say that this record is a standout amongst Halley’s oeuvre? Maybe it’ll mean more to say that the front line of Halley, trombonist Michael Vlatkovich, and baritone saxophonist Vinny Golia make vibrant multi-color weaves out of Halley’s tunes, and that bassist Clyde Reed and drummer Carson Halley (son of Rich, which can’t hurt) ably bridge the lurching funk prescribed by Julius Hemphill back in the 70s with a tumbling, free-flowing pulse. Let’s just say that if you check out his work you’ll be allotting just deserts to a fine, under-recognized jazz man and also doing yourself a favor.
Just a reminder that Silkworm is probably the most slept on band active in the '90s and early '00s. I mean, I'm biased - my Last.fm history has them as my most listened to band by multiple degrees. I've listened to thousands of individual artists and bands and loved and liked many of them, but these guys are still my main squeeze. RIP Michael, I still regret not stopping you on Pine St to say hi because I was too nervous about fanboying out. I regret it more after talking to Tim at a Bottomless Pit show and he was super friendly and said that he recognized me for SKWM shows. While I'm thinking about it, I was chuffed when Charlie Z. brought Tom Kipp into my bar and I just happened to be playing "In the West" and we had a good chat. Menches all around.
