I used to be really heavy into americana, but my interest began waning as it got kind of trendy and a metric fuck-ton of utterly mediocre and derivative acts started popping up. It didn't put me off because it became "cool", I just don't have the patience to sift through it all. So I just stuck with my Munly and David Eugene Edwards albums and called it quits.
The a few years later, a friend turned me onto the music of Erik Wunder. Man's Gin and Cobalt. Cobalt are rad, but this is what really grabbed me because it's americana and it sounds absolutely genuine. there's no hint of irony here, and that's usually the great downfall of modern music that sounds old timey. This album and the previous one, Smiling Dogs, are full of A+ songwriting and performance. They're affecting, heartfelt and almost exist in a bubble which goes back to what I said about lacking irony. It seems completely natural for Wunder to be writing music like this, it's not forced at all.
Once again, I find myself at a loss for what to say. My only complaint is that Jarboe makes a little guest appearance to moan a little in the background of one of the songs. This is a trick a lot of artists are employing, getting Jarboe to do this on their albums. To me it seems like a grab for street cred. "Hey guys, I got Jarboe on my record!" That said, it doesn't detract from the overall high quality of the music and I just happen to find Jarboe to be pretty annoying outside the context of pre-reunion Swans. The running joke is that I'm going to have "Shut up, Jarboe" engraved on my tombstone. So nevermind. It's tough to write about a lot of the music i want to write about because most of it speaks for itself and it's more a matter of convincing the reader to just listen to the damn album instead of elaborating on the fine points of the music and so forth and so on. I feel like I need to figure out the internet version of holding a gun to people's heads while I force them to sit through whatever album I'm trying to pimp out.
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Mans-Gin/163217557044788
http://www.profoundlorerecords.com/
