Despite the changes in personnel, it seems my original praise applies more than ever. Each track provides an interesting, nuanced narrative of American life. When a band is described as ‘literary’ the first thought is some group of lit students who quote Camus or Kafka or Kerouac, but Field Report aren’t that. They are literary in the sense that their music and writing seems to be on a par with books and poems, their work possessing the relevant weight to become important and meaningful beyond the noisy escapism that typifies much music. Written down this sounds pretentious or grand but the reality is just the opposite. Like the most successful fiction, Porterfield’s writing is humble, real, able to be all shades of sad and beautiful. He leaves it to the listener to decide what they take from it, be it comfort or disturbance.

The album opens with ‘Decision Day’, a song which first appeared on Conrad Plymouth’s great record Comrade Plymouth. The fact that I have heard this song before plays as an advantage. The opening line, “Now the morning was gilded around the edges…” feels like an old friend, a cosy, familiar introduction to the album, a new dawn full of promise, and a portent of good things to come. Next is ‘Home (Leave the Lights On)’, a tale of homesickness, of being in a band and on the road and spending your time pretty much anywhere other than home (note the artwork features two tiny figures separated by a chasm). Porterfield describes the oncoming winter and the woes of a lonely Christmastime with typical eloquence:

“Cold snapped like a coiled spring
you can feel the frost is coming on
we are marigolden – dropping orange and umber,
just barely holding on
and now downtown’s dolled up with tinsel and angels
seasons sneaking up like haircuts, teased apart and tangled”

But there is hope in this song. The chorus of “but leave the lights on cause it might be nighttime when I get there, but I’m on my way home” offers relief from all that longing, or rather transforms it into something precious. Here it becomes clear that Porterfield is talking about a capital-H Home, something more than four walls and a roof, an answer, a solution, a promise that the troubles of the present can and will be solved.

The third song ‘Pale Rider,’ not-so-coincidentally one of the saddest on the record and goes some way to illuminate the other side of this coin. The chorus of “I don’t know that I can be your place to go, or what you need” could be read as either a blow off or a plea for reassurance, and speaks of the pressure of meaning so much to another person, the burden of being this mystical Home in which someone has put so much faith. But even here there is a sincerity that offers a shred of hope, a sense that we are all alone together rather than altogether alone:

“Now the next thing I know, I’m on your back
with a suitcase full of the wrong things packed
we’re out looking for your family but doubling back
to every bar we chose to pass on
now you’re cantering crooked and screaming at the wind
and shooting off flare guns in memory of the kid
his birthday was yesterday; he would have been six
oh my god, I am so sorry.”

One of the main themes of the album is Porterfield’s struggles with alcohol and his newfound sobriety. ‘Cups and Cups,’ ‘Ambrosia’ and ‘Wings’ delve into this idea, pitching alcoholism as the bad present vs. the happy future (Home), with no guarantee of a happy ending for all the struggling. “I keep spinning my wheels,” he sings on ‘Ambrosia,’ “maybe nothing’s gonna change.” Here he comes off like a character from a Denis Johnson story, lost and sad and drunk or wishing to be, crawling from bar to bar knowing that it’s probably killing him or would if given half a chance.

‘Marigolden’ sees a change in tone, a small narrative concerning a fleeing woman and a plane crash. At first this seems out of place amongst the personal nature of the rest of the album, although Porterfield (or whoever the lead male character is throughout) could easily be the “him” in the opening lines (or it could be that she is the Michelle of the next track?). Regardless, the lyrics are wonderful:

“I left Nebraska in my summer dress;
left him behind there to straighten out his head
Jane was working for the airline and she bumped me up to business
she feels the thrill of every liftoff in her heart and chest
She smelled like saffron and glowed gold and rust
years ago, I loved Jane Harmony once
but the fall fell from August and the petals all dropped off
we’re always finding old lives to run away from”

Next up is Michelle, which is a tale of an ill-informed love affair. “Uncle Sam can meet me by the treeline,” he sings. “He and I and your husband we can work it out like men but we won’t end up eye to eye.” You get the sense here that the narrator can sense Home is close or at least halfway possible and it builds up to a frenzy where every idea is a good one, where plans are desperate and exhilarating and of the essence:

“I got five thousand bucks, a full tank of gas,
and a stars and stripes beach towel with a cigarette burn
If we leave right now we’ll be there by morning
there being anywhere but here
we can make a new start; we can make up new names
I’ve already picked yours, Michelle.”

The new start is reflected in ‘Summons,’ where sobriety is a reality, albeit the shaky, edge-of-a-cliff sort of sobriety where it seems the smallest breeze would send him over the precipice and into the drink (quite literally):

“I’ve been two weeks dry, in a bar every night
I’ve been pissing coffee, quinine and lime
and the fog’s been lifting; I’m doing alright
I still can’t look nobody in the eye.”

Closing track ‘Enchantment’ takes the long journey and joins the ends, completing the circle, and making a long journey an endless one. Again opening with images of morning and life (“Easter morning in New Mexico: the Son/sun is risen on another day”), the narrator never actually reaches the Home he had been longing for. Instead the album closes on a curious balance of hope and grief. He’s been sober for a month yet still pining for Home, still on the journey and filling it with loud noises and violent actions in an attempt to make sense of it or at least feel better for a while:

“Now it’s growing wide around us, this feeling in these bones
as we shoot the wind with rifles and then bludgeon it with stones”

I find myself returning to the Denis Johnson comparison. Angels and Jesus’ Son are populated with sad men trying to find something like this Home, then refusing to believe it or else not liking what they see when they get there. Instead they return to the old bars and the new women and the extraordinary promise of an endless search. Whether Porterfield’s character is doomed on these lines is not clear, but if he is then he hasn’t yet grown cynical with it. The closing lines are infused with belief, the marigolden hope that is woven through album.

“The Lord came in the wind and the dirt–
where he sometimes can be found if you
squint; soften it to silhouettes–
His tessellated love is all around”

You can buy Marigolden now via Partisan Records. It is my favourite album of the year.

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Small Hours follows a similar pattern to previous old earth releases, although that is about the only ‘convention’ that it follows at all. Umhoefer is a great believer in experimentation and in taking risks. He says:

“If you want to be an inoffensive “regular” musician that just aims to please everyone, go ahead, but meaningful art comes out of making extraordinary choices. There are plenty of ways to avoid challenges and risks in life, and nothing interesting, unpredictable, unique, or inspiring comes from cowards.This is the most valuable lesson I learned from punk – celebrate yourself, whether everyone likes it or not.” 

This attitude is very apparent when listening to the album. It consists of just three tracks, all of which exceed five minutes in length (the longest clocks in at over ten minutes). The titles of these tracks are extremely vague, simply 1, 2 and 3 (although there is a more detailed list on old earth’s bandcamp which splits each track into several more). From that evidence alone I think it’s pretty clear that Umhoefer does whatever he wants, and that he is unconcerned about generating huge media buzz, or getting prime-time radio coverage. What he makes is art, and he makes it because he feels compelled to do so. This fact seems to have further relevance this week, when hundreds of bands and music people descend on Austin and huge, multi-million dollar companies splash their logos all over stages that are meant to be the platform for aspiring artists.

The music itself is in the same vein as previous old earth releases. Traditional folk music serves as a bedrock on which Umhoefer does his experimentation. The atmosphere is strange and dreamlike and Umhoefer’s vocals only add to the surreality, sporadically sounding like ominous demands or earnest pleas or the shamanistic chants of some psychedelic ritual. If you are a fan of lo-fi folk music (e.g.Phil Elvrum or The Wandering Lake) or even of drone/ambient stuff such as Grouper,  then I suggest that you quickly get familiar with old earth.

Small Hours will be released on the 22nd of April and is now available for pre-order via mini50 records. The CD comes with a beautiful lyric booklet that contains art by Jamie Mills (check out his website, some of his work is simply amazing). There are several packages on offer – you can just get the CD, the CD plus and old earth tote bag or a bundle which contains the CD, the bag, a bonus EP and a download for old earth’s previous album a low place at The Old Place. This is a very limited release, so I’d strongly recommend you order yourself a copy right away.

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a low place at The Old Place is an album that Umhoefer released last year, consisting of six songs which appear as a single track, which comes in at just over 18 minutes in length. Several of the tracks have been previewed on Bandcamp in the past (most notably ’more wrung in the wrong?’ which was the track that introduced me into Old Earth) but this is certainly the definitive collection. The album was recorded in the basement of Umhoefer’s grandparents’ vacant home, where he says ghosts are abound. This eerie atmosphere pervades the entire album and some of the haunting experimentation on show really is rather beautiful. There’s also this strange and ominous side to it that makes the whole thing fell like some sort of weird fever dream. The sparse lyrics provide a perfect accompaniment to the music. Below are the lyrics of ’wait less, more strings’, which I think give a good indication of the atmosphere of the album as a whole:

What if it’s all in the fall? 
What if it’s all in the fall? 
What if it won’t happen now? 
What if it’s all in the fall? 
What if it rains again? 
What if it’s all in the fall? 
What if it’s an old house? 
What if it’s a wait? 
What if it’s an older word? 
What if it’s a weight? 
What if it’s alone? 
What if it’s a wait? 
What if the word was so? 
What if it’s all in the fall? 
What if it’s a wait? 
What if it’s a weight? 
What if it’s a wait? 

The album was produced by Christopher Porterfield of Conrad Plymouth and Field Report (who we are very big fans of), who also lends vocals on the album. Nick Berg and Travis Whitty, two other members of Field Report, also lend their talents to the project. You can buy the album on vinyl, CD or digital download via Bandcamp – and it’s really really good so I would suggest that you strongly consider it.

Old Earth has also recently signed with mini50, a label based in Edinburgh, and has a release, titled Small Hours, scheduled for release in the Spring. I have embedded the teaser trailer (which was created by Blackbox Visual, using footage from Don Ford) below:

Old Earth – Small Hours album trailer from Blackbox Visual on Vimeo.

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But for me the album’s strength lies in the writing, which borders more on prose than the melodic lyrical writing of most other bands. Each track shares the high-quality writing and storytelling which, at least for me, is what makes anything Porterfield has released thus far so special. For example, a line in ‘I Am Not Waiting Anymore’ goes:

I spent eight long years working on my screenplay; it’s a teen movie with young actresses that plays to the middle-aged. I have read between the lines and I have been wrong every time, I burned it on the altar but I am fine. I am not waiting anymore.

And perhaps my favourite line from ‘Fergus Falls’:

I was concealing his kid under his crew-neck state school sweatshirt while he grinned off in the distance behind prescription shades and they were blocking out the clouded-out sun while he was hoping against a daughter and no-one saw my banners, my bruises, my flares, my flags.

The “new” tracks follow a similar blueprint and the storytelling aspect is never more apparent than on ‘Taking Alcatraz’, a song about Native American activist Richard Oakes who led an 18-month occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco between 1969 and 1971, before being shot and killed aged just 30. The song is brilliant and it attempts to say more in its five and a half minute duration than most artists do in entire albums. Other previously unheard tracks include the laid-back ‘In The Year Of The Get You Alone’ and the dark ‘Chico The American’ which is all gin drinkers and country blues. Another standout is the closer, ‘Route 18’ which opens with the line: “Elizabeth said last night the lake roared like the ocean, I was landlocked under the orange-white solstice moon. Imagining a place just meant to conjure up another, three degrees of hometown disconnect in my unborn daughter’s room.”

The song goes on to pensively chart several generations of life in some American town, dealing with the weight of time and family history in the vein of classic American literature. I have recently been reading Neon Bible the debut novel by John Kennedy Toole (the author of one of my all-time favourite books A Confederacy Of Dunces), a nostalgic and reflective look at family in small-town USA, in a style that is Flannery O’Connor meets Harper Lee. Maybe it is just the proximity of me reading this book and hearing the song, and there certainly aren’t any real thematic links between the two, but the general feel and nostalgia of both formed some kind of link in my mind. This is, if nothing else, a testament to the high standard of Porterfield’s writing and should be taken as high praise. It also raises another important aspect of the record, which is that music such as this should ideally be heard during a period of peace or isolation, its full effect will not be realised if there are a number of other things vying for your attention, much in the same way it is difficult to read a book properly whilst listening to music or having a conversation.

The album is available now to stream in its entirety via Billboard and will be released on September 11^th on Partisan Records. A great recording of a performance at  The Mercury Lounge in New York City is also available via the excellent nyctaper, a free download of the set is available in good quality here.

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