This may be Chicagoan guitarist Eli Winter’s first self-titled album, but that certainly doesn’t indicate a paucity of collaborators. And while Winter, a folk experimentalist with formidable chops has focused on these skills on previous releases, here he revels in musical partnerships. Ryley Walker, Yasmin Williams, Tyler Damon, David Grubbs and the late jaimie branch are all featured on the album. Compositions that are filled with interesting combinations but never overstuffed make this an engaging listen all the way through.
“For a Chisos Bluebonnet” brings pedal steel to the fore with Winter’s guitar, the resulting duo entirely in keeping with leftfield country. “Davening in Threes” employs a trio of guitars in an effusive jam. A brief drum solo sends it into a slow, abstract section with aphoristic punctuation. It then returns to the opening’s freewheeling demeanor. In its opener, “No Fear” has creepy, howling vocals and whammy bar guitar playing angular melodies. This is followed by low guitar arpeggiations, guitar glissandos, and propulsive drums. It is like an alt-folk horror movie score. The coda knits a signature Winter riff between the gradually diminishing clangor.Â
“Brain on Ice” is quite different. An enjoyable, ambling tune with recognizable changes and an old-fashioned turn around. Once again, pedal steel matches guitar riff for riff and chugging bass and drums fill out a pleasant, yet skillfully deployed, ambience. “Dayenu” features branch, and every note serves as a heartfelt valediction from this extraordinary musician. Midway through, there is once again a pause and interlude followed by a sweet-toned descending progression featuring chord melody by Winter and a fiery solo by branch. The final track, “Unbecoming” begins with solo harmonium, a delicate sound that foreshadows the lyric, autumnal quality of Winter’s playing. A compound tune with a Celtic quality, “Unbecoming” gradually builds into a rousing close with fleet fiddle joining the other instruments.Â
The genre hybrids that Winter addresses in S/T mix well, and the arrangements are, to a song, well-crafted and conceived. It appears that Winter thrives with a bit of company. One hopes he will make collaborative albums in the future as well.Â
Sunburned Hand of the Man—Headdress (Three-Lobed)
Headdress (20th Anniversary Remaster) by Sunburned Hand of the Man
Sunburned Hand of the Man was making music a long time before they were making records. Starting in the mid-1990s, members gathered regularly in a shared living space, spinning out shambling, gnostic grooves that moved slowly, as if in a trance, on the clatter and twang and rattle of improvised riff. They made road trips down to New York, where NNCK was performing similar rites and mysteries. They toured with John Fahey, near the very end of his life. But they didn’t make an LP until 2001, and that was this one, Headdress, a slow-burning, head-nodding shared vision that presaged the heavier sounds of New Weird America.Â
Sunburned, then and now, was a large, loosely knit ensemble moving to its own rhythms. Formed around a core of drummer John Moloney and guitarist Rob Thomas, at the time of this recording, it included ten members, playing a variety of instruments, but almost everyone took a turn on percussion. It starts in a gravelly yell of “Oh yeah,” in “Shitless,” as band members coalesce in loose sychronicity. There’s a high trebly guitar, a clicking, clattering mash of percussion, a slack-jawed ramble through heated, smoke-filled landscapes. It’s founded in rock, you can hear a good deal of soul in it as well, the boom shackalacka boom-ing syncopations of Sly and the Family Stone, the expansive acid visions of Funkadelic, not to mention the outer space jazz of Sun Ra.
The title track is maybe the wildest and wooliest of these cuts, carving up its sonic space with wild slashes of trumpet sound (Phil Franklin) and antic squiggles of sax (Chad Cooper gets credited with “winds”). There’s a ton of delay on pretty much everything, so that sounds hang around in the ether indefinitely. And yet, there’s a strong, grounding structure under it all in the heavy drum and bass foundation. You might see god along the way, but you won’t get lost.
“Headdress” is possibly the most jazz-like of these cuts, but “The Underground Press,” is my favorite, a smoldering processional boogie layered like a lasagna with various shaken, struck and clanking percussive sounds. The bass nods along like a shaggy beast, and the drum kit, when it comes, rallies the whole thing into triumphant forward movement.
There’s something rallying, motivating almost about the way this music moves. Woozy and inchoate as it can be, it nonetheless slips into your pulse and moves you onward. It works this way, even through ear pods; hard to imagine how enveloping it might be right there.
River is dedicated to Richard Cizik, Jr. That name might ring a bell because of the dedicatee’s famous dad, a writer and former higher-up in the National Association of Evangelicals who garnered lots of attention by following his faith right across the political spectrum, to the point where he currently maintains that Christian values mandate action against climate change and marriage exclusions. Association with the angels doesn’t guarantee anyone immunity from tragedy — fresh out of rehab, the younger Cizik died from an accidental OD a week before Christmas in 2013. Bachman doesn’t declare his exact relationship with Cizik in River’s liner notes, but since they were both born the same year and grew up in Fredericksburg VA, it’s not a great leap to suppose that there was some level of connection or identification between them. The album is also more generally dedicated to friends and family who have passed on in recent years; the titular body of water is not just the Rappahannock, where young Cizik loved to fish, but the metaphorical stream that everyone must cross when life ends.
Currently 25 years old, Daniel Bachman has already carried the torch for several years as a leading light of the latest generation of American Primitive Guitar players. A strong association with Jack Rose, whom he befriended while still a teenager, and the inevitable comparisons with John Fahey can’t obscure Bachman’s emergence as his own man, artistically speaking. Despite drastic differences in their intentions and methods, one thing that has united the pillars of American Primitive is their determination to make their art stand for something more than just nice music; good playing, vivid writing, and a firm grasp upon traditional guitar modes may be essential, but they’re not enough. Robbie Basho expressed visions of exotic, multicultural paradise, while Fahey encoded so many dimensions of myth, truth, and falsehood encompassing personal calamity, artistic conflict, national-generational-racial tension, and record collecting that biographers have already published over a thousand pages trying to unpack his baggage.Â
Bachman’s vision may not be so grandiose or complex, but his discography — 15 cassettes, singles, and albums on his own, in collaboration with other musicians, or under the early alias Sacred Harp — has grown large enough that it’s possible to map its terrain. It encompasses two streams of releases. One, which includes the self-titled LP on Lancashire And Somerset and the recently reissued Grey-Black-Green, is a series of off-the-cuff, experimental affairs. The records that fall into the other category, such as the magnificent 2012 release Seven Pines, comprise carefully plotted compositions for acoustic steel-stringed guitar. River comes from the latter line. It is the first album he ever recorded in a studio, and both the clarity of the recording and the precision of the performances betray considerable effort spent getting it right. In concert, Bachman often plays these pieces more loosely and roughly, but the exactitude exercised here helps one to grasp the dynamics at play in his compositions. Things are constantly in motion, sometimes slow, sometimes fast, but always purposeful and engaging.Â
The records from both tributaries are full of references to places. While Bachman doesn’t reach Basho’s feverish ecstasy, he expresses palpable awe on tracks like “Orange Co. Serenade,” “Mount Olive Cohoke,” and River’s “Farnham.”  These are the places he grew up knowing, or places where people dear to him now live. They are also places stained with the blood of old wars. This is something you can’t get away from if you live in the American southeast, and it’s an inescapable aspect of Bachman’s music. He doesn’t tell you what to think about that history, or even what he thinks, but the music’s emotional resonance whenever he plays such pieces suggests that for him, these are places of present joy. “Won’t You Cross Over To That Other Shore,” which opens and closes River in epic fashion, continues another trend in Bachman’s nomenclature. Like titles on other records, it implies a familiarity with Christian discourse that’s easy to come by if you have grown up in the American south. Many American Primitive Guitar practitioners have been lapsed Christians or unbelievers, but from the whitest-bread hymns to the midnight terror of Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground,” Christian devotional music is one of its wellsprings. Bachman has publicly downplayed personal religious involvement, but he enthusiastically shares his latest private press gospel acquisitions on Facebook.Â
Whether dealing with history or religion, Bachman is in touch with his cultural milieu, and one gets the sense that for him, it’s a balm. In that sense, he couldn’t be more different from Fahey. Fahey’s responses to family dysfunction, suburban alienation, and the embedded inequities of mid-20th century America resulted in some celebratory music, but more of it expressed dark satire, corrosive anger, and a myriad manifestations of self-protective withdrawal. Bachman, on the other hand, copes with the pain of loss with assertions of connection — to people, to places, and to nature. These roots, his music suggests, can be really handy when withstanding circumstances that could blow you away.
