Back in 2013, Lexington, Kentucky songwriter Doc Feldman teamed up with several friends and collaborators for Sundowning at the Station, an album released under the moniker Doc Feldman & the LD50. The record introduced Feldman’s distinctive style, drawing upon the folk traditions of American music but subverting conventions with more experimental sensibilities. Be it the haunted field recordings of opener ‘Ready’, cold ambient textures on ‘Alive For Now’ or echoed distortion on ‘Only Light’, Doc Feldman proved how songwriting can evolve and experiment while staying true to its roots.
Now recording as Doc Feldman & the Alt + Cntry + Delete, Feldman returned this spring with a brand new record, A Healthy Dose of Anxiety, on Shaker Steps Records. With more of a full band set up, the album sees a continuation of the inventive spirit that marked the debut, further developing the dark Americana sound by branching out into psych and seventies rock. The result is something far richer but no less evocative, a sound capable of presenting sadness, bitterness and love in one heady hit.
Take ‘Screwed’, its sleek and sinuous retro tones offering a real counterpoint to Feldman’s distinctively brooding vocals, a deceptively laidback shuffle over which his vocals emerge impassioned and caustic. “Ain’t it just like life to put the screws to you?” goes the opening line, “As if you aren’t already screwed? / I’m still trying to find that line between losing my shirt and losing my mind.” This is the mood of A Healthy Dose of Anxiety. A piercing sorrow with the way things are, a tangible fury that it was allowed to ever be. A deep desire for action yet a nagging inability to enact change. This is typified by ‘Heavy Edges’, which sets its sights on directly on whatever stage of capitalism we’re calling this now.
Of course your left hand don’t know what your rights been doing
Who’d want to see such feats of inequality?
So don’t pretend to want to deliver on your promises of deliverance
when all you do is keep feeding the machine
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But where there is feeling, there is still hope. The bluesy swagger of ‘Receiving (for Rollo May)’ passes through desperation and loneliness via dogged determination, while folk rock hymn ‘Help Never Comes from Above’ reworks the cynicism of the title into a celebration of other possibilities. Progressing with what might at first seem like pessimism, decrying magic spells and empty prayers, the song repurposes such disillusionment into human solidarity. Clasping hands not in plea to God but to pull another out of the shit. If we have control over anything, it is what happens here around us. “Help never comes from above,” Feldman sings, “and if it does give thanks for the grace of earthly love.”
For all of the record’s dissatisfaction, Doc Feldman repeatedly finds this other side of the deal. Not an answer as such, but at least a direction in which to channel one’s energies. Be it the wistful warmth of piano-led ‘San Antonio Missions’ or the bright rhythm of ‘Straight Talk / Fully Wired’, A Healthy Dose of Anxiety transcends the bleak world in which it lives through sheer grit and determination. Succumbing not to easy fantasies but the call of hard, imperfect work. A willingness to stare down the worst of things, find motivation there. “I’m just hoping the pain can be a driving force,” he sings on the latter. “For our solutions to find their course.”
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A Healthy Dose of Anxiety is out now and available from the Doc Feldman & the Alt + Cntry + Delete Bandcamp page.