Nathan Bowles – Plainly Mistaken
Paradise of Bachelors – 5 October 2018
Plainly Mistaken comes at us dressed in yellows and oranges and even contains a slightly sped up, band version of Ernie Carpenter’s ‘Elk River Blues’, a song he played so beautifully and starkly on his debut A Bottle, A Buckeye set. Here the blues are lighter, with the deliberately quicker tune and fuller sound adding brightness, but don’t be fooled, there is melancholy present still beneath the surface and challenging tunes quite unlike anything Nathan Bowles has put on record before. But for over half of the songs here, Bowles has employed the services of bassist Casey Toll and percussionist Rex McMurry, creating a more immediate and punchier sound, best demonstrated on the superb ‘Road Reversed’. McMurry’s solid drum beat begins the track with an underpinning line, while Bowles’s banjo fidgets and shuffles around the arrangement, waiting for Toll’s double bass to line up, before the three of them launch into the meat of the track, about a minute in. Further down the road, the melodica adds some mournful textures to the music, creating ambiguity at the centre of the piece. It’s equal to ‘I Miss my Dog’, his finest piece from his Whole and Clover album, one of Bowles’s very finest pieces, but with the undeniable energy of a musician bouncing off of his bandmates and enjoying the trio setup.
The solo pieces on the record smartly offset the band work, with ‘Umbra’, coming in after ‘Road Reversed’, displaying acres of space after the relatively rich workout before. Here Bowles layers a scale banjo line beneath another piece of slightly itchy and worried playing, creating a mysterious piece that works beautifully here. It demonstrates the focus Bowles brings to his albums, which, with yelps and studio sounds, could be construed as being quickly put to tape. The balance throughout Plainly Mistaken suggests otherwise. Take the two central tracks, ‘Ruby/In Kind I’ and ‘Girih Tiles’; the former comes at us like a Primus song, with bowed banjo, bowed cymbal and distorted, growling vocals repeating Cousin Emmy’s ‘Honey are you mad at your man?’ line. It all gives the song a carnival feel, with the trio setting a pretty pace with the playing too. Once the abstract ‘In Kind I’ plays out, Nathan switches instruments to his wooden banjo, or ‘mellowtone’, which is quite a literal name for the instrument, for ‘Girih Tiles’. As a sibling to ‘Umbra’, the song is indeed softer, with the wooden body rounding off notes and giving an eastern lute-like flavour to the song. It’s the album’s biggest departure in terms of sound and brings to mind players like Robbie Basho and Chuck Johnson.
In the last third, the band step in again for ‘Fresh and Fairly So’, the album’s most traditional sounding song. Bowles’s banjo is more leisurely paced here with the bass and drums keeping things simple and lifting a sunny melody. ‘In Kind II’ is reminiscent of the sort of music Daniel Bachman played on his current Morning Star album, with bowed strings and cymbals along with the double bass creating a moody soundscape that leads on nicely to final track ‘Stump Sprout’. This solo piece of clawhammer playing by Bowles plays like an outtake from ‘Sleepy Lake Tire Swing’. The song is the shortest here at two and a half minutes but, like the ebbing and flowing lullaby ‘Now if you Remember’ beginning the set, creates a warm and gentle bookend. It also sees the end of Bowles’s finest album yet, a confident recording skilfully crafted and well balanced and containing some of his most challenging and thought-provoking playing.
Order Plainly Mistaken: http://smarturl.it/PoB43
Photo by Brad Bunyea