We’ve featured Morning River Band, the country band led by Jeffrey Fields, several times in the past, describing their music as “songs about those men down on their luck but too stubborn to change, men doomed to making the same old mistakes and who continue chasing the same misguided remedies.” This month sees the release of their latest record, Brambles, via Under the Counter Records, and the album is a further exploration of divorce, drinking and death—the triumvirate of curses that hang over American folk.
Still, that’s not to say the record is one long dreary dirge of heartbreak. Indeed, one of its key motifs is that of juxtaposition. Clear guitars soundtrack muddied emotions as love and loss stab one another in the back, freedom and pain flashing in a constant cycle. How much value can be drawn from such an existence is up to interpretation. “Brambles are an interesting growth,” the press release describes. “They can bear flowers and fruit, but many consider them weeds due to their growth in neglected areas and sharp thorns. Whether brambles are worth eradicating or cultivating is all up to perspective.”
The continuation of a series of songs across all previous Morning River Band albums, opener ‘Drinking Blues Reprise (3,700 Brokenhearted Days)’ sounds exactly as you’d imagine, all hungover lonely cowboy blues. The wry pessimism lifts somewhat on ‘Monmouth County Blues,’ or at least shifts slightly into a different shape. The song more reflective, its narrator in a constant search, knocking on doors and interrogating the half moon in the heavens.
There’s another dose of red-eyed whiskey blues on ‘Drinking Blues, No. 3 (Bend, Fall, Break)’, while ‘Sun Alone’ finds our narrator contemplating a sunrise by himself, reflecting on wronged lovers and a lingering sense of guilt. It’s a song wrapped up in both regret and defiance, the familiar Morning River Band theme of men fated to make bad decisions and abandon those that try to love them. “I ain’t ever coming home,” goes the devastatingly simple final line, summing up the spirit of the track in a handful of words.
The first upbeat country song on the album, ‘Bury Me’ is infectious, full of bluesy guitar and carefree defiance. It begins like a story we’ve all heard before, as Field sings “The good Lord said to Noah, ‘son build yourself a boat, take two of each of everything out there that doesn’t float.’” But this Noah doesn’t want to listen, and vows to live (and die) on his own terms.
“But Noah turned away,
he said I don’t work for you.
I toil and sweat I do the things you refuse to doso send the wind and send the rain,
I’ll die right where I stand,
bury me with my regrets”
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Continuing the theme of juxtaposition, ‘(All of My Best Friends Are) Dead & Gone Blues’ bemoans the diurnal cycle, pining for the moon all day and the sun all night. Even the mourning suggested by the title is bittersweet, the loss altered by the knowledge that he too won’t be far behind them. After the playful interlude of ‘Space Boy Rag,’ ‘Ezekiel’s Wheel / Gloucester Skyline’ emerges, two songs in one separated by a void of guitar effects. However, the second half rises from quiet acoustic guitar into a rousing ballad, as though in defiance of the gaping space from which it crawled.
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The album then ends on ‘The Last Red Bank Blues’, a track which serves as both the denouement and genesis story of Brambles. Here the broken-hearted narrator parks atop of a mountain and eases his foot from the brake, the only note he leaves behind that of a lyrical tune (the song, the album). This is a man finding betrayal and divorce hollowed out into their blackest nadir, and escaping through a headlong rush toward a hard ground.
Brambles is out now via Under The Counter Tapes and you can get it from Bandcamp.
