Perhaps at the end of time we will feel the full weight of history hitting us from behind like a train. Perhaps as the world limps towards its final moments we’ll experience a flickering, cut-up dream movie made up of random constituent parts of human history. These are the sort of thoughts that must have preoccupied Creekbed Carter Hogan during the making of Peasants Revolt, a record that acknowledges the possibility of an imminent apocalypse but is steeped in a wide range of musical and social histories: medieval uprisings, the Haitian Revolution, twenty-first-century trans activism, Americana, political folk music.
To say Peasants Revolt provides a rich and varied listening experience is an understatement. It’s not just the influences that are far-reaching; the songs that result from them are exuberant in their difference, both from each other and from anything else you’re likely to hear. A song like Cutbank of Cleves rolls along like a surrealist Gillian Welch, with verses full of quick-fingered guitar motifs and a chorus buoyed up by crunchy chords. Burn is gentler, adding elements of folk-pop to the country, like the most tuneful moments of early Big Thief. But the tune’s prettiness belies its lyrical preoccupation with global heating and the manufactured inferno engulfing America. As the song reaches its conclusion, the focus narrows to a more personal standpoint: the narrator and their partner in a car, burning with a different kind of heat.
It’s these changes in perspective, these sudden shifts to or from the personal, that make Peasants Revolt such a unique album. Sometimes they are accompanied by a corresponding shift in pace, like the gear-change in Icarus Again, a song that seems to rearrange itself in its final minute. Britton Beisenherz, Hogan’s co-producer, has a hand in this. Beisenherz also provides a piano and organ that strike a note somewhere between bar-room and Brechtian musical theatre.
Other members of a twelve-strong cast of musicians include Nora Predey (bass, baritone guitar, backing vocals), Sarah Schultz (drums) and Zack Wiggs (pedal steel), and just as lyrical themes often veer between the widescreen and the introspective, the music too can inhabit both of those worlds. The brilliantly handled tension and release of the title track is a perfect example: taut banjo, high strings and Hogan’s fraught vocal build into an emancipated finale full of flighty flute and joyously crashing drums. Similarly, Mirrors is a song of two halves: a delicate folk song that twists into a faster, more insistent section, ending in disorienting repetition. Bluebonnets feels like hazy, classic-sounding country-folk (laid-back Laurel Canyon tempo, sweeping pedal steel) until you concentrate on the lyrics, full of endings and deaths. Games of Pretend is a paean to authenticity in the face of a damaged society; the fact that it lilts along on an almost jaunty acoustic guitar only serves to make its message more powerful.
Among the album’s strangest and most compelling themes is the hot dog, which emerges as an unexpected, slightly surreal and completely apposite symbol of America past and present. Opening track The Last Supper is essentially an advertising jingle, while Hot Dog! Apocalypse takes place in a hot dog museum (presumably O’Betty’s in Ohio). In fact, a hot dog can symbolise pretty much anything – consumerism, sex, even perhaps the climate-changed world – and Hogan is well aware of that, committing to the bit in the final track, the wispy, collage-like After the Wurst of It.
Peasants Revolt is a wise piece of work, not because it tells you how to live out your life in these desperate times, but because it realises that it might be too late to do that. All you can do, Hogan seems to say, is create something beautiful in the knowledge that it might be your final meaningful act. A detailed American pastoral, Peasants Revolt is certainly a beautiful album. It’s also a powerful one. If everyone embraced authenticity in the way Hogan does, then the world wouldn’t be in nearly so much of a mess.
Peasants Revolt (July 24th, 2026) Gar Hole Records