Dustbowl Revival – Is It You, Is It Me
Medium Expectations/Thirty Tigers – 31 January 2020
Over the past four albums, the California sextet Dustbowl Revival have served up a steady supply of Dixieland jazz, swing and Depression-era folk songs, but, for their fifth, they’ve charted a new direction, drawing on roots-rock, soul and even funk.
Fronted by co-founders Zach Lupetin and Liz Beebe, they open with shimmering keys, swiftly joined by brass and plucked strings with Dreaming, the title reflecting the laid back pace of a song about at very bad case of stage fright going on to face an adoring audience (“choking on the love/From everybody looking at you… Up until this moment I never had no regrets And I feel my head hit the floor/And I just can’t do this anymore”). They keep the musical mood upbeat, whistling their way into the pulsating march beat rhythms of Enemy on which Beebe sings about a parent-child relationship with both on different sides of the Trump divide (“I could never be your enemy/But now I just can’t be your friend”) giving way to the first of three five-minute cuts with the sway-along Sonic Boom addressing the difficulty of showing the real you on social media as Beebe sings “I don’t know myself/Just who I want to be”.
As you will have noted, the songs come with topics beyond the pitfalls of love, most notably on the soulful Memphis shades of Get Rid Of You, a number sung by Lupetin informed by the spate of school shootings that, echoing sentiments on the new Drive-By Truckers album, comes with the angry line “All we ever see are the old folks doing nothing/You can shove it where the sun don’t shine with your thoughts and prayers/who fucking cares”.
It’s not hard to spot who they’re singing about on the Paul Simonesque bouncy New Orleans shuffle of Nobody Knows (Is It You), in which the protagonist runs for president and accidentally wins. However, in their fantasy version, they decide to give it all up and go grow wine instead, “keep it simple tell no lie”. If only.
Not that they don’t do love songs. Mentioning Simon, you can also hear his influence also percolating through the rhythmic shuffle of the joyous first love memories of Penelope with its carnival party vibes, while, with echoey vocals, I Wake Up adopts a Sam Cooke groove to declare “when I look in your eyes, it’s like the first time”. Featuring opening pounding drums giving way to a greasy horns reggae skank, Ghost has Beebe in growly vocal mode as she sings about a mysteriously vanished lover (“they said that you were gone/But the divers never found your body”) while, in contrast, but still concerning death, Mirror comes with pizzicato strings and a paradoxical lush orchestration given it’s about two young lovers driving out to California at night only for things to end in tragedy, guilt now staring at him through the rearview mirror.
Indeed, the album has its fair share of downers. On Runaway with its dramatic opening, fiddle solo and slow sway melody, Lupetin plays the restless spirit (“I’ve been thinking about leaving everything behind/Maybe all of this growing up…. isn’t my style”) declaring “I only feel at home/When I’m so far away”. Then, there’s the finger-clicking closer Let It Go loaded with the regrets and self-doubts of the opening lines, “I’ve been trying so hard to be a better version of me/I found that note I wrote/When I was twenty-one years old/I thought I’d figured it out. And I still don’t know my fate/And maybe I’ll never escape”.
Ultimately though, the song, like the album, is one of hope and determination, because “there’s no right way to do anything/And so trying is the only thing/You can do.” On the acoustic chugging Just One Song with its cooing harmonies and Springsteen reference, the bar band singer comes to understand the power of music to comfort and heal in times of love and loss, and that “I might as well put a smile upon my face/ Just in case somebody’s feeling real low down/I can turn it around I can right a wrong, give me just one song”. Here’s 13.
Photo Credit: Shervin Lainez