One of the more exciting things about reviewing new music is when you stumble across something so different that you struggle to find a yardstick to compare it with. Granted, in these days of deconstruction and reconstruction, this is a rarity and a new, pure form of music is always just out of reach.
It is interesting then, that it should be the Black Twig Pickers who suddenly fall into this category for me. Why? You may ask, are they taking Radiohead limitations and expanding to other horizons? Hardly, Black Twig Pickers choose another direction and focus on “old-time music”. In this case the banjos, fiddles and barn dances of the Appalachian Mountains.
By regressing to a time when recorded music was in its infancy, or indeed before it existed, Black Twig Pickers have taken the sounds of their great ancestors and brought it stumbling into the 21st Century. In a weird slight of turn, their old-time music has become contemporary.
On an album which is mostly instrumental, the banjos and fiddles take you on a journey down the ages to a time when music was passed along by word of mouth. You find yourself drawn into its peculiar ethereal quality and praying for a hoedown before sundown. Take Banks of the Arkansas which whips you into a state of frenzy with its repeated signature fiddles and banjos plucking away like a demented off shoot of Deliverance. Original yet nostalgic.
It is the contemporary twist that gives this album its lift. Maybe this is down to the actual recording or to the drone like feeling you get after repeated listens. You know that feeling you get when you are lost in the nether regions of Glastonbury Festival where all the weird people hang out? This is that. It is not a million miles removed from the space rock drone of techno or electronica which perhaps demonstrates a theory of dance through the ages.
So take a listen, jiggle your ass to chaotic sounds or wallow in the more romantic texts that float along. You sure as hell won’t hear anything like this again all year. A great album to start the year and a great yardstick to live up to. Last year it was Mariachi horns, this year its Appalachian folk.
Rough Carpenters is on on February 18th through Thrill Jockey.
Words by Martyn Coppack.
