Alive People therefore blurs line between live and not. An almost surreal tone, the sense of things heightened, life stripped to its weird, wonderful energies. The mood builds upon that of 2019’s Kleinmeister, also released by Orindal Records, which used an abundance of details to achieve its singular style. “Poetic and often bizarre, Kleinmeister is an album where light and dark are marbled into intricate swirls,” we wrote at the time. A record which straddled the organic, synthetic and spiritual through a sense of accumulation, where the sublime and absurd sat side by side. As we continued:

Juxtaposing Adirondack green and cemetery stone grey with a lurid latex shine, the record presents the environment as a museum of trash—rotting fruit and meat laid out next to polyethylene and polystyrene and plasma-powered TV screens. The physical mess dictates a mental one too, old wounds and shitty thoughts persisting, because no longer are discarded items out of sight and out of mind. Rather, the great drifting detrital mass looms over both the landscape and conscience, the past not buried but everywhere, clogging up the present and the future too, refuse refusing to degrade.

Alive People is no more frugal. After the self-reflective opener ‘No Mono Aware’, which sees Garbus reflect on creative insecurities, irony as armour and the manifold dimensions of any one personality, the record zips around a diversity of subject matter as it sees fit. ‘Healthy Gamer’ is an ode to the titular character, as well as the strange mix of confinement and freedom which marks their experience. “Stately gamer, living in your chair / Your arm’s length the limit of your stare,” as the opening lines go, though seconds later this is followed by a differing observation. “I see us in those candy lights, above the Sim sea / Arresting our development / But making us free, giving us wings.” The question then becomes, in a society so keen to scrub away purpose or connectivity beyond labour, which is more real—IRL or RPG?

Various collaborators helped shape the album, with elie mcafee-hahn (synth and bass), Julie Bodian (atypical guitars) and Julia Tadlock (voice and presence) all lending their talents on stage, Nick Bisceglia taking engineering duties and Justin Pizzoferrato the mixing. The result is a sound often understated but always surprising, the trademark Ruth Garbus invention extending to their use of space and patience too, allowing the songs to be some of the most visionary and intimate to be released this year. ‘Rubber Tree’ presents an interspecies relationship as a joyous mutualism, ‘Whispers in Steel’ the most delicate ballad to the traffic on Brattleboro streets you’re ever likely to hear, while ‘Waiting for the Sun’ meditates on self-care in all of its banal detail and mindful integrity.

Two small squares of dark chocolate
One or two vials of red wine
“You get the bags”
The candle smells of pine
Waiting for reality to strike
Anxiety is suffering but
Lightly, lightly
We’re waiting on the sun

And things don’t stop there. Songs about the unreality of cinema (‘Pastel Umbrella’) and the transcendence of sports (‘Sports’) are followed by one centring on the miracle of the town hall meeting, the appropriately titled ‘Reenchantment of the World’. “When you go to town meeting you will see people’s minds / Heaping the clay onto mounds under heaven / Reaping the harvests of offices,” as Garbus sings, “And there was government music.” The track brings to mind films like Frederick Wiseman’s City Hall, pushing through the mundane bureaucracy of civil service to reveal the marvel underneath. That energy which exists when people gather as a community, work to realise things they could not achieve alone.

This relationship between the individual and the collective threads right through Alive People—the struggle between protecting personal idiosyncrasies and the enriching potential of the group—right down to the process of its recording. In this way, Alive People could be described as a kind of musical vérité. The product of a single mind, recorded live yet edited to be more truthful than it might otherwise manage. The sound of an individual reaching out beyond their confines in order to share their energy. Songs are awake when you sing them. Between the performer and the performee flows an electricity.

Alive People is out now via Orindal Records you can get it from the Ruth Garbus Bandcamp page.

Cover painting by Audrey Weber

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“When the responsibilities of adult life start tugging at your limbs from all sides, you need to prove to yourself that this thing called music is still worth your time and money. In the past few years, I’ve had to work at this music thing harder than ever before in my life. I’ve sacrificed sleep to simply find a few minutes to sit down with a guitar and write, to make it to a gig or rehearsal.”

Today we’re delighted to unveil the first single from the album. ‘Room For Love’ is what the label describes as a “big band, rollicking, Americana-y thing”, which is pretty accurate as descriptions go. Roberts fronts the ensemble that also features percussion, fiddle and pedal steel, providing all the zip and bounce needed for a late-summer slice of romantic country. What’s more, like all the best folk music, Wooden Dinosaur manage to conjure that peculiar nostalgia related to rural living, stimulating the part of the brain or soul that still yearns for honesty and simplicity – working with our hands and living from the land.

“So I took your hand and you took mine,
hey I’ve found someone to work side by side.
We laid our prayers aside for the hammer and glove,
we built a room of love.”

Working Weather is set for release on Lost Honey Records on the 30th September. You can pre-order it on vinyl, CD or download from the Wooden Dinosaur Bandcamp page. The band are also playing some album release shows in October, so be sure to head along if you are in the area:

14 October | Peterborough Historical Society | Peterborough, NH*
15 October | Spotty Dog | Hudson, NY (solo)*
16 October | Parlor Room | Noho, MA*

*with Sam Moss, Trevor Healy

Photo by Hart and Sol Photography

The post Song Premiere: Wooden Dinosaur – Room of Love appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The reason I divulge these details is that they seem pertinent to the sound of the record. It’s the sort of album that seems to need state names and historical references in the review, it needs details of travelling and recording at home. In the age of the internet, where songs can be created entirely by a laptop, No Kingdom seems a relic to an older time, a reminder of what songs used to be about, stories that chronicle some pre-war region. There is a sense that we are listening in on some precious communication, messages from a time where words could not be broadcast across land and water instantaneously. As Moss sings in ‘Hammer’:

“Write me a letter 
Leave it at the door 
Tell me something 
You never have before”

Maybe these messages never reach their intended target, the plea for the person to write goes unheard. These could be wishes and regrets locked in time as well as space, emotions that are decades old but alive in song.

I recently read an interesting article on Paste Magazine that questioned whether true folk music is possible anymore, arguing that folk music is music that is played for friends and neighbours, shared only within a community, and anything else is pop music with different instruments. Obviously, the internet age has made sharing your talent with a wider range of people both easier and essential for budding musicians, meaning that maybe the true definition of folk is now nearly defunct.

Whatever the true meaning of folk really is (or whether is even matters), you get the impression that Sam Moss is as close as a musician who shares their music online can possibly get to true fok music. It is a paradox that I say this sat at my computer a with the entire Atlantic ocean between us, but Moss’ songs do seem personal, addressed to members of community I do not know. I earlier used the term pre-war and I think it’s a suitable way to describe the feeling on this record. It brings to mind a time where people knew less of the world but more of each other, a time before the great connective ability of air travel and telephones and the internet worked their (paradoxically) isolating magic.

No Kingdom is to be released on the 15th October. You can pre-order the CD or MP3 album via his Bandcamp page.

As well as a burgeoning solo career, Moss makes up half of The Howling Kettles, an old time folk duo that released two albums in 2012. You can find further details of The Howling Kettles here, and you can explore the back catalogue of Moss’ solo work here.

And while we are on the subject of buying from bandcamp – read Jeremy from over at HI54LOFI explain why it is a vital (and underrated) tool in modern music.

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