Trampled By Turtles – Alpenglow

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Produced by Jeff Tweedy, Alpenglow is Trampled by Turtles’ tenth album and, without doubt, the band’s most contemplative album to date.

Almost two decades into their career, the title referencing the light in the mountains just before sunrise or sunset, fronted as ever by Dave Simonett alongside bassist Tim Saxhaug, banjo player Dave Carroll, Erik Berry on mandolin, fiddle player Ryan Young and cellist Eamonn McLain, this is the Minnesota newgrass outfit’s tenth album, produced (in a rare handing over of control) by Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and with songs that mine both nostalgia and the uncertainty of the future.

Both are brought together on the banjo and fiddle-dominated midtempo opening track, It’s So Hard To Hold On, where, with Tweedy on acoustic guitar, Simonett sings about how, while time goes by fast, the days can crawl, so you should “grab your lover and hold them” and “Sing a song in a way that you never did before”.

The pace picks up for the more bluegrassy Starting Over, again concerning both change (“Starting over ain’t so bad/Not the home you thought you had”) and holding on (“My address you know it don’t change”) with its “Don’t let go” refrain. The melancholia returns on the cracked vocals of the sparse acoustic ruminations of loss and growing older in Central Hillside Blues (“They ripped up the streets in old Duluth/A violent reminder of an older truth/Nothing’s the same, how could it be?/When I’m not the devil that I used to be/There’s a simple blinding light/That left without warning on a summer night”) when there’s “Not much to accomplish nowhere to be”.

On The Highway kicks it back up a gear again, balancing what was (“Built a house up long ago just to up and leave it”) with what could be (“There’s a bright light in the cold dark night so bloom where you’re planted”), one more returning to change in “Out on the highway/We’ll never be the same again”.

The only song not written by Simonett follows, Tweedy sings background on his own Lifetime To Find, a banjo and strings-fuelled traditional-feeling number played as a dialogue between the narrator (“Oh death I was just getting dressed/The place is a mess/I was hoping you’d forget/But I can feel you in my chest, I can feel you in my chest”) and Death (“I can see you’ve done your best/The problem is just this, it is too late for regrets/I am here to collect”), that reinforces the underlying carpe diem sensibility of not wasting the time we have (“It takes a lifetime to find a life like the life you had in mind”).

The darkness that claims here is offset in the following track, Nothing But Blue Skies, which shifts from resignation to the inevitable (“Ain’t it strange how a heart dies/Tied up on the inside with nowhere to run”) to the possibility of better times(“I’ll see you tomorrow, if you open the door”) as evidenced in the title and being caught somewhere between (“My lights are not blinking/And my ship is not sinking …but lately I’m thinking/I’m not the same anymore”).

Optimism informs the buoyantly chugging  Burlesque Desert Windows with its vision of domestic happiness despite the tough times (“Go on and tell me it ain’t love as I wipe the tears…right off the wall”), but even so, there’s still a glass half empty on the table (“Hot and surely bleeding now can you get me out of this bubble/I’m in a disappearing town where everyone grew strong and tall”) in probably the only song that will ever feature the phrase “Isotonic freezer”, Simonett remarking how he just likes the way some words fit together even if they don’t make any sense.

There’s more traditional styled bluegrass with banjo and sweeping fiddle for All The Good Times Are Gone, a title that probably requires no further explanation where “right now might be all that matters”,  slowing it to a backwoods lazy waltz for We’re Alright, about finding reasons to stay rather than leave (“Under most conditions I would bleed/There’s a lunch bell ringing in the factory/I would quit right now if i had somewhere else to go/But I met you at the perfect time/With a switchblade knife and some cheap red wine/I could love you baby till the wheels fall off”) that, in an earlier era, would have been sung by The Lovin’ Spoonful.

Driven by scraping cello, gradually augmented by fiddle and banjo, the penultimate slow swaying Quitting Is Rough conjures thoughts of an Appalachian Roy Orbison as once more he sings of an anchoring love (“See the stars up high above/Love me with a painless love/Someone might pull the rug out any minute”) in what would seem to be about overcoming some sort of addiction (“There’s a poet on his knees in the gutter/Yeah quitting is rough you know it is/What’s the point of any of this?”) that ends in the self-encouraging refrain to “Climb out, climb out”.

It ends with the drunken sway, Western-flavoured campfire two-step The Party’s Over, perhaps awaiting another encounter with death, where he sings of  “Old dirty floors and old smoky barrooms” and memories of when “I once was a writer of disparate means”, and old songs recall when “We were drunk on each other and Croatian wine” but now “the landlord is smoking a butt in the hallway/My instincts get duller the more that I drink” and “I’m left here thinking/Of the dogs and the moonlight and you”.

Suffused with that titular glow that marks both the end and the beginning, this is, without doubt, the band’s most contemplative album, one in which to immerse yourself and, at the end, as it shuts up its doors, to echo Simonett’s words “I can’t believe it/It’s time to say goodbye”.

Order – Alpenglow – out now (CD/Vinyl/Digital)