3hattrio – Lost Sessions
Okehdokee Records – 26 March 2021
3hattrio‘s new album ‘Lost Sessions‘ is so titled because they thought the audio files to their new, more experimental work had been destroyed when a piano fell on the hard drive and crushed it, thanks to the efforts of a lost data salvaging company we’re now able to soak in the fruits of their bold new visions.
Fans should not be overly concerned, however, that the trio’s trademark dry Utah desert blues has been abandoned, it’s just that the banjo, violin and upright bass grooves have been reworked to often take on a dancier feel and, at times, a more evocative sense of a feeling or a place.
They ease you in gradually, opening with the skeletal, pulsing In Or Out, about the strong opinions and arguments than swirl around in our heads, often in conflict with each other, bass throbs and ghostly voices distant in the background. That ominous atmosphere’s compounded with the near-wordless Lost in The Woods, where the night is ink full of “wolves a’howlin’, old men scowlin’, lanterns lookin’”, a cinematic desert noir soundtrack of prowling, ghostly noises before a pulsating bass rhythm sets in like an anxious heartbeat.
Miss Tilly is a lighter affair, a song basically in praise of ignoring club management and playing it louder, the almost indecipherable vocals used as an instrument over the persistent minimal bubbling bass pattern. Then the rhythm picks up further for a scurrying bass-line and the instrumental Gallus, the title a Glaswegian colloquialism for an act of bravado, the fiery fiddle niggling away with neurotic flushes and banjo having palpitations.
Another instrumental, Attack Of The Shadows has a decided tribal feel with the pulsing rhythm and the brief banshee-like fiddle swoops affording a peyote trance-like atmosphere before banjo stabs call it to a halt. Again delving into more experimental, improvisatory waters, opening with spectral jazzed upright bass and ghostly treated vocals, No In-Between was apparently originally a Hal Cannon poem about computer gaming written in the voice of a grandfather bemoaning his basement warrior’s nephew for whom the boundaries of games and life have blurred. As the fragmented piano notes and distorted spoken title mantra take it to the end, you may find yourself thinking of some wild union of Roger Waters and Captain Beefheart.
Clocking in at almost ten minutes, the low moan, duststorm winds Disquieting is another cinematic sonic landscape piece that, again using the words as part of the sepulchral instrumentation, conjures an air of dread that amply complements the title, almost as if someone uncovered a damned Gregorian monastery beneath the Utah sands.
Driven by an itchy paranoid banjo, brief icy piano notes, forlorn violin, percussive propulsion and again treated vocals, On The Run is another improvisatory experiment with sound and textures to create unease, leading to Never Going Home’s just under two-minute showcase of Eli Wrankle’s violin, stereo mixed as part raw and organic, part synthesised to give a feeling of being adrift in space, absorbed into the cosmos.
Opening with what sounds like a flourish of Jew’s Harp and riding a banjo train, it ends with the funky hallucinatory Beefheartian tribal stomp of Pushin’ You Down, the lyrics, if you can uncover them, relating a Hollywood-set tale of manipulation and confidence erosion that has, of course, a far wider application. Not one to have you sing along perhaps, but, pour a tumbler of mescal, crush in a few psychotropic salvia leaves and let your inner ghost dog off the leash and you’ll definitely be wanting to thank whoever that software repair engineer was.
Order the album via Bandcamp: https://3hattrio.bandcamp.com/album/lost-sessions
Online Album Launch pay-to-see and view anytime on 26 March – 9 April. Details here.