Smoking schwag behind the grocery store, drinking gas station cream, sitting on rocks on the sunny lakeside and whiling away long lazy hours with a first love. Such moments are key to Horses, the new record from Chicago’s Tobacco City. Chris Coleslaw, Lexi Goddard and pals make country music that has one foot in the golden-hued past and another in the painfully real present. This is true both in terms of their sound, which freshens up classic seventies country (think Emmylou and Gram) for the modern ear, and its lyrics, which compound the often confusing, disappointing and bittersweet nature of the present day with a yearning gaze at the past.
Label Scissortail Records describe the album as “a nostalgic journey through the haze of youth, where time feels suspended and plans are non-existent.” The band achieve this by focussing on these small snapshots of bygone days. Seemingly mundane moments where boredom breaks its levee and becomes something of its own rush, where the dissatisfaction of cooped-up small-town living is tempered by time’s unhurried passage. Here, the future is not some dark unstoppable force rushing toward you in a clatter of hoofbeats, but something intangible, indistinct. Something to worry about tomorrow.
But its not all rose-tinted nostalgia, looking back can be painful too. Opener ‘Autumn’ is a case in point, reminiscing on provincial adolescence with an intoxicating combo of wistful longing and teeth-gritting unease. “Autumn is about the hilarious pains of growing up in a shitty small town,” Coleslaw describes. “All of the embarrassment and humiliation of being a teenager all seems so funny and sad from years away. All of it distorts as it becomes crystallized as memory.” It presents the pervading sense of no-hope aimlessness as both a freedom and a cage. Nothing matters and there’s no way out, a fact that can be both crushing and strangely liberating. “I never knew about leaving,” as Coleslaw sings, “I never knew about nothing.”
Follow up ‘Bougainvillea’ takes a similar template, a paean to responsibility-free youth that’s as warm and woozy and fragrant as the summer night on which it takes place. “’Bougainvillea’ is my favourite song on the album,” says Coleslaw. “It’s another nostalgia trip about the time in your younger years when you are free to be stupid and silly with very little consequence.” The track is delivered in a dose of swaying country, Andy “Red” PK’s pedal steel bending behind steady percussion and subtle piano. Coleslaw delivers his vocals with a forlorn faraway gaze, adding a sense of higher meaning to the tales of debauchery. “Those days of excess were wild and illuminating,” he continues, “but eventually times have to keep changing. But the view from the heights of those times never changes.”
The entire record continues in this vein, moving from good-time toe-tapping euphoria to solemn late-night longing, and spanning comforting nostalgic familiarity to a desperate desire to leave the depressing desolation of small-town existence.’Blue Deja Vu’ is a moody slow burn, while ‘Buffalo’ kicks up a cloud of dust in its wake as it gallops on by. Starting in a jittery shuffle that feels uncannily like waiting for the opening line’s red light to change, ‘Mr Wine’ is a song about an anxious liquor run, about finding relief at the bottom of a bottle. “Bye bye blues / hello Mr Wine,” Goddard sings in the blossoming chorus, where everything relaxes and things start to feel upbeat. But it’s hard not to see the song as a spiritual prequel to ‘AA Blues’ on previous album Tobacco City, USA, which plays like a flash-forward reminder of how this story ends. “Why can’t we just lie here? Tell it like it ain’t,” Coleslaw asks on the mid-tempo ‘Way To Get Out’, “like you are a princess and I am a saint.” It’s a rare moment in which the desperation is acknowledged directly, where tenderness tries to poke through all the hard living (“Cause all my life, I’ve been filled with doubt / And all my love is just lookin for a way to get out”)
Despite everything, it is ultimately that tenderness which shines through. Like when Goddard gets to flex her vocal skills on ‘Fruit From the Vine’, a richly romantic country swayer that’s heady with the smell of the lake and rosy-cheeked from booze or young love or both, or the three title track interludes, short ambient sketches with repeated mantra-like lyrics, that see things get a little cosmic, transcendental. But perhaps the most obvious example is on the unofficial centre point, ‘Time’, a song that captures Horses‘s spirit in just four minutes. Languid and laidback, but heartfelt too, an unhurried anthem that extols the virtues of not rushing away from that which, when you actually stop and look closely, is kinda beautiful after all.
The evening moves in gracefully
and hovers just beneath divine
Doesn’t beg that we even try not to
take our time
Horses is out now via Scissortail Records and you can order a copy from the Tobacco City Bandcamp page.
