Old Saw are a “network of New England string pluckers, organ drivers and bell ringers” led by Henry Birdsey, a composer, multi-instrumentalist and recording engineer based in Vermont. Birdsey is joined by Bob Driftwood, Ira Dorset, Rev. Clarence Lewis, Harper Reed and Ann Rowlis, forming an ensemble which utilizes pedal steel and lap steel and banjo and fiddle, as well as resonator guitar and pipe organ and orchestral bells to create a slow and winding chorus that evokes the natural world and us humans’ place in it.
Next Month, Old Saw will release a new record, Country Tropics, on Lobby Art. Comprised of just four tracks, the album is the perfect introduction to the Old Saw ethos, combining elements of folk, country, ambient and drone into long bending hymns to the American landscape in all its beauty and disorder. It’s as patient as the seasons, finding wonder and devotion not in the cotton-wool clouds of some celestial realm but the dust, dirt and decay of the here and now.
The result is something unique, an atmosphere quite unlike any other. Country Tropics evokes an ambience of prayer-like solemnity that celebrates something decidedly terrestrial, what the label describe as “a rusted and granular shadow world where the dive bar meets the divine.” It recalls one of those junkyard shrines built by some sincere eccentric, improbably wonderful forms of weathered stone and scrap metal standing like totems to an unrecognised religion rooted in the earth around us. As Lobby Art continues, Country Tropics approaches this broken and corroded world “as an iceberg,” the ensemble “dredg[ing] up silt, clay, weeds, and trash to craft a more holy image of our tattered landscape.”
Today we have the pleasure of unveiling the record’s closing track, ‘Chewing the Bridle.’ Surfacing from a single ambient tone, the song unveils its textures with slow grace, the various elements coalescing around the pure drone bedrock to achieve a sacred air. But rather than being transportive, the sound is anchored by that which surrounds it. Concerned not with the looming sky or unseen heavens or even the refuge of one’s own mind, but very ground before us. Old Saw give us devotional music folded back on itself, ethereality inverted, arms aloft and palms out, digging into the tactile dirt.
