There are 200 or so CDs on consignment in the local music section at Tower. Some are vanity projects that no third party would invest in. Others are album-length demos made by singers and pickers seeking record or publishing deals. Still others are by artists who, for whatever reason, can’t abide the industry game. Now that CDs are fairly cheap to manufacture, it seems that every intrepid soul who commits something to tape has a record out. Most of these albums aren’t very good, though some are; the following represents a sampling of the latest local and regional releases worth noting.
Stacey Earle’s debut, Simple Gearle (Gearle), is the best sort of homespun project, a record so intimate that it sounds inevitable, as if Earle had to make it, if only for herself. Which isn’t to say that her Music Row publisher wouldn’t love to see someone like Deana Carter or Chely Wright cut “In My Way” or any of the other fetching, acoustic-guitar-based originals here. Ultimately, though, Earle’s clutch of quotidian reveries is so unassuming and felt that only a churl could chalk it up to ambition or connections. (Earle is singer-activist Steve Earle’s kid-sister.)
Some listeners have observed that Earle’s winsome soprano resembles Nanci Griffith’s. While that’s hardly a stretch, Earle conveys a dark—and, in “Wedding Night,” sexual—urgency that also conjures the grave whimsy of Kate and Anna McGarrigle. Wrenching tropes like “Everything had its place/Even the tension in your face” and “Where would I be if it weren’t for you/How could I grieve and hurt like I do” confirm her kinship with the Quebec sisters. The aching accordion that accompanies Earle on many of the album’s tracks does so as well.
Aashid Himons has recorded everything from reggae to space music, and he’s been putting out his own records for decades. Lately, however, Aashid has been digging his roots—the knotty mass of hillbilly music and country blues that he grew up hearing as a kid in Appalachia.
His new album, West Virginia Hills (Soptek), is a loose-limbed session recorded live at Gibson’s Caffé Milano last October. Reprising a half-dozen songs from his 1998 Mountain Soul CD, the material here ranges from old-time string-band music a la the Mississippi Sheiks (“Country Blues”), to Mance Lipscomb-style songster fare (“The Captain’s Song”), to brooding Delta blues (“Spoonful”). Inventive arrangements keep these familiar songs sounding fresh, whether it’s Tramp’s feverish fiddle on “Little Red Rooster,” or Bobby Taylor’s crying blues harmonica on “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.”
Eight of the album’s 13 songs, including the encores (“Voodoo Chile” and “Statesboro Blues”), run longer than five minutes. While long track times often allow musicians to partake in the worst sort of self-indulgence, Aashid’s jam band keeps things groove-based and song-focused, rather than degenerating into unfocused noodling. Doubtless, much of this is due to the vision and charismatic presence of Himons himself, an emotive singer with a seemingly boundless sense of history.
In the fact sheet that accompanies Chilhowie’s debut, Happy Hour (Jojojaboba), the group calls its music “loud, gutsy, ragged rock not too distant from the Replacements, Bowie, or The Beatles.” Well, not quite. While those influences are certainly evident in the trio’s songs, there’s nothing noisy, daring, or unkempt about the playing on Chilhowie’s debut. Generic modern rock is more like it.
From the flaccid faux-soul of “Loser” to the numbing Soul Asylum homage of “21st Century Mantra,” to the Greg Dulli-styled melodrama of “F♦♦K,” almost everything here sounds less inspired than received. It’s not that the performances are bad: Among other things, timekeeper Shannon Pollard (Eddy Arnold’s grandson) keeps the proceedings tight. But apart from “Ash Wednesday,” a catchy Replacements knock-off, Happy Hour is pretty forgettable—the worst sort of average.
Vic Varney may be from Athens., Ga., but his luminous self-released solo debut, One-One, offers an interesting sampling of local music bubbling up in another community not too far from our own. A former mainstay of the ’80s Athens group the Method Actors, Varney makes no bones about wanting a publishing deal. But on One-One, he proves himself to be so singular a singer-songwriter that it’s hard to imagine anyone else doing his songs. Like the page poet that he is—the Athens weekly Flagpole recently dubbed him one of five local poets to watch—Varney exults in the lyrical qualities of language, viewing meter, beat, accent, and even pronunciation as musical tools. On the record’s title track, for example, he rhymes “icicle” and “paradisiacal.”
Varney’s intuitive finger-style guitar, accented at times by bowed bass and assorted percussion, is equally evocative. Indebted by turns to blues singer Mississippi John Hurt and bossa nova great Antonio Carlos Jobim, his playing is a good fit for his gauzy, Nick Drake-inspired vocals. The record’s hidden track, an evanescent reinterpretation of Drake’s “Which Will,” even renders the connection explicit, as do the formal similarities between One-One and the ill-starred Englishman’s final album, Pink Moon. (Both records include 11 songs and run just under 30 minutes.) Yet unlike Drake, Varney isn’t so much depressive as whimsical, as his pregnant lyrics attest. “I know what every woman wants,” he sings in “I Must Be Drinking,” “to go to sleep with George Jones and wake up with Roy Orbison.”
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