Resonant Rogues – Autumn of the World
Self-released – 28 June 2019
For the last six years, Resonant Rogues – Sparrow and Keith J. Smith have been busy hauling their suitcases across the US, around Europe and up through the Balkans, assimilating traditional music influences and different cultural ideas along the way. Returning home to Western North Carolina, they’ve distilled all this into their musically variegated new album ‘Autumn of the Word’, kicking off, suitably enough, with Sparrow’s wheezing violin bringing a Gypsy jazz flavour to her Maker’s Song, a salute to the act of creation as she sings “Oh how I love it in the morning when an idea pulls me from my bed/Can’t wait to get to work creating all the things that are swirling in my head.”
From there, Smith, accompanied by accordion, Daisy Castro’s violin and Eric Heveron-Smith on upright bass, takes us down the Paris sidestreets for the equally restlessness-themed Tramp with its Gallic cabaret air and a guitar solo that conjures thoughts of The Third Man theme.
Featuring, as on many of the tracks, Kirsten Harris on fiddle and drawing on recurring imagery of water and nature, Big Ivy, a number about divesting yourself of things you don’t need to find what you do, has a sort of Turkish rhythmic lurch (indeed, later the itinerary takes in a visit to souk on the instrumental Zeus Faber). Then, it’s musically back to Appalachia with the mortality-themed title track, the frisky tempo at odds with the fact that it’s “a song for the sad ones” falling prey to addiction and depression “whose flame it burns too bright for it to stay” and the feeling of guilt of not being there for them when needed.
We’re back on the road with Smith for Watching Those Wheels Roll, a number cast in Oh Brother territory that, Melissa Hyman on cello, draws a parallel between the hobos of the Great Depression and today’s itinerant musicians, both of whom, he concludes, “fit like a glove under wealthy men’s shoes.”
John James-Tourville on pedal steel, Be Around My Darlin’ is a fairly straightforward love song in a vintage country swing and string band style before they head back up the mountains with Strength of Water, Sparrow picking banjo and taking a traditional folk approach feel to her vocals on a number which, featuring a roll along chorus and Smith’s stabbing guitar bridge, celebrates the renewal power of water. Natural forces are again present on Following The Sun, essentially a song about making the most of every day otherwise “You’re just holding on to nothing with your feet in the mud.”
The journey takes them down to New Orleans with Ben Hovey on trumpet and Heveron-Smith on trombone for Duelling With Demons, another Sparrow number that plays like the obverse of the opening number in that it’s about battling with insomnia where it’s the needling voices in your head rather than the creative urge that won’t let you sleep.
They’re a little self-reflexive with Point of No Return, a lurching gypsy jazz meets hayride stomp which turns a mirror on song-writing as catharsis or exorcism, “Putting words and melodies to life’s most cutting shards/Our wounds just lying bleeding there for everyone to see,”, though the closing line of how “we just keep on moving, always chasing feeling free/Always running, trying to escape our misery” suggests it should be sampled in a spirit of playfulness.
They ostensibly end (there’s a final brief untitled hidden instrumental) with The House That Condos Stole, an old-timey country Louvins-like waltz telling the true story about a friend who set her heart on buying a house with a handbuilt miniature Wild West village recreated in its yard only to be beaten to the punch by a development company which paid in cash and tore it all down.
An album that clocks up the musical air miles, but never feels like just some passing tourist, as with the season of mellow fruitfulness that its references, the colours here are breathtaking.
The Resonant Rogues are on tour in the UK during July including Maverick Festival and London’s Green Note. More details can be found on their Facebook here.