The Mammals – Nonet
Humble Abode Music – Out Now
When not trading as a duo, Mike + Ruthy (guitarist Mike Merenda and his fiddle-playing partner Ruth Ungar) head up The Mammals. While usually a quintet, on Nonet, they embrace bandmates old and recent to expand, as per the title, into a nine-piece. And that’s not counting seven backing vocalists, Gail Ann Dorsey and Kate Pierson among them.
The seasonally pre-emptive Coming Down Off Summer gets the ball rolling with banjo and pedal steel setting the scene. Unger’s voice then kicks in on a song that speaks of the restlessness of being back home after a stretch on the road with just “a handful of festival laminates hanging in my wall” and hinting at the strain being in one place can put on a relationship.
Merenda takes over the writing and the soft vocal chores for the slow walking Radio Signal, the tune borrowing from Wild Mountain Thyme and Baba O’ Riley as the pedal steel soars, another song about blowing (rather than in) with the wind and a reminder that, to paraphrase Lao Tzu, “to start a journey you must first begin it”.
He stays on the mic for the gently rolling slightly CS&N melody of What It All Is, the first to introduce political commentary as, mentioning a friend buried in Arlington, killed fighting for oil, he observes that if you follow the money “you catch the thief”, leading directly to the line “some still believe you’re the commander-in-chief, but I know who you answer to” as he sets his sights on the munitions and arms dealers.
Ruth returns for the Merenda-penned Dylan (or perhaps more accurately Guthrie)-inspired If You Could Hear Me Now, again speaking of how the world’s running out of time and space in a quietly hopeful call to arms so that “the people win and prosper in the end and leave something to believe in”. Charlie Rose’s pedal steel solo on this track is a thing of beauty. Hope continues to bloom in the rolling folk-country styled Beyond Civilization (“I looked out on the lawn/Saw the birds take off in formation, they were beyond civilization”) in which a penitentiary becomes a metaphor for the planet as he dreams of flying above it and free.
Written by Ungar, the goodtime California offers a dappled banjo rhythm from Merenda with its vision of sunny skies and summer beaches a visual tonic in these testing times. Another of her songs, Someone’s Hurting, follows, except this time it has a funkier groove to its focused marching beat. Rose is on the banjo for a lyric that chimes with the current Black Lives Matter protests as she sings of white privilege and how, if someone shot her, they wouldn’t walk free and “we wouldn’t be talking about how I bought it on myself”.
A bit of a lockdown fantasy, Merenda’s You Can Come To My House is an open-arms invitation for friends to share time together (and even sleepover) to “bitch about the White House” or “pick some records out” and help yourself to whisky and coffee, set to an ambling pop melody and cooing backups.
With Rose on banjo and the organ grooving in the background, it gets funkier again on Unger’s environmentally-themed East Side West Side, the lyric nodding to Guthrie as she sings “if this land is your land, if this land is my land, then let’s not leave it dirty for the ones that come behind” because “we’ve all gotta drink the water, and we’ve all gotta breathe the air”, a call to take a stand for freedom in the face of “close-minded bigotry”, gospel backups adding to the flavour.
Opening on a drum roll, pedal steel and massed voices, Merenda channelling Arlo Guthrie, it ends with the slow marching You Gotta Believe, one last call to come together and a reminder that “there’s a lot of good out there, you just got to believe” and the more we do, then the more we may realise that “we are the ones that we’ve been waiting for”.
It also throws in a five-track bonus CD. It includes an Unger fiddle workout on the trad Hangman’s Reel, her own jug band stomp All The Things, a beefed-up Richard Thompson-esque folk-rock take on Dylan’s Let Me Die In Your Footsteps, a bluesy steel and organ narcotic sway through Etta James’ Something’s Gotta Hold On Me and, originally on Ungar’s 2002 solo album, Four Blue Walls, here adopting backwoods banjo blues reading of The Duhks’ 2005 arrangement, spiced up with a gutsy electric guitar break number.
Nonet is a terrific world class album.
Stream: https://ffm.to/nonet.opr
Bandcamp: https://themammals.bandcamp.com/album/nonet