Melding Appalachian musical sensibilities with heartbroken, downcast lyrics and dry wit, Stripmall Ballads updates traditional songwriting for the contemporary time, the age-old concerns of death and longing cast through a modern lens to include everything from PTSD and estrangement to Gatorade and rubber gloves.

February saw the release of DISTANT, a brand new full-length album from Stripmall Ballads that develops this style. “There are two kinds of people who will pullover and stop when they see a stranger with a guitar singing at the crossroads,” explains the press release for the record. “The kind you wish who would, and the kind you wish who wouldn’t.” DISTANT is the product of such a sentiment, written from Wisor’s experience of “wandering through the American heartland and underbelly,” with the inevitable “encounters with various souls, both fraught and forlorn.”

Concerning a literal pick up, opening track ‘Susan at the Crossroad’ is the beginning of this journey, Wisor placing all of his faith in the titular Susan, who certainly falls into the kind of person you wish would stop. From here the songs cycle through a series of sights and situations, each offering a distinctive blend of sadness and possibility, as though in the overwhelming longing and regret lies something small and immovable, some distant faith in the possibility of magic, however fleeting that moment might be.

The result is something rundown and dangerous and still pushing on, the American Dream distilled into these poetic vignettes. ‘Pull Over Johnny’ is a great example, a song which took shape after “one evening spent on a levee visiting a with a hustler and woman who were fishing as the sun went down,” Wisor explains. “He was proud of his bait and she was wondering if she should leave town. They were both kind and I wrote this for them and their memory.”

There’s a mythic, near-Biblical quality to some songs, be it ‘Don’t Mind Me’ with its black skies and fallen towers, or ‘Juice and Sage’ and caves of sharp obsidian. Others feel more personal, tracks like ‘Marietta’ sung from beneath a great weight of wistful longing, stabs of the past arriving as smells and sounds and old touches grown ghostly. All are as concerned with the past as they are the present, and kept alive only by the indistinct future that is surely something brighter than this.

DISTANT is out now and available from the Stripmall Ballads Bandcamp page.

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Tracklisting:

Frog – American
The Phone Booth – Ballad of Indifference
Spielbergs – 4AM
Neurotic Fiction – Collateral
Neighborhood of Make Believe – Track Names
Pizzagirl – body part
Orchid Mantis – porch song
Gorgeous Bully – patience
Reighnbeau – Trading Heat
Troy Everett – Absent
Amparo – Hounds
REW<< – Victoire Impossible
Okay Embrace – Moving
Young Jesus – For Nana
Vender & The Cobras – Everything is Beautiful
The Lostines – Faith in Love
Haley Heynderickx & Max García Conover – Little Wind
Rivulets – Everything Goes
Balto – Bullshit Dream
Meat Wave – That’s Alright
Docks – Kiosk
Satanic Ritual Abuse – Hurting (Adjective/Verb)
SATU – Growing Up
Anna Tivel – Fenceline
Madison Turner – Richmond, Virgina
Elly Swope – 6.8
Nathan Ball – All or Nothing
Monarch Mtn – canyon blues
Stripmall Ballads – You Were Good (I Was Good For a While)
Katie Mullins – Crocuses
Lisa/Liza – Tea Kettle
free cake for every creature – shake it out
Katy Kirby – Tap Twice
Lung Cycles – hottest day of the year so far (4pm version)

You can find all of our Monthly Roundup playlists here, and peruse a wider range of mixtapes that we’ve put together over the years.

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Stripmall Ballads are back with a brand new release, Good For a While, a two-track EP that aims to pave the way for a brand new full-length album in 2019. Along with Evan Harris (bass), Jeremy Ebert (slide guitar), Darren Whitaker (guitar and vocals), Brandon Woods (drums and vocals) and Joshua P. James (harmony vocals), Phillips Saylor Wisor has evolved his sound so that it has something of a paradoxically rich lo-fi style—bringing to mind Gillian Welch and Townes Van Zandt but also big rocks bands like R.E.M.

A-side “You Were Good (I Was Good For a While),” draws inspiration from John Kennedy Toole’s Neon Bible, the Southern Gothic overtones fleshing out a world of strange violence and constant struggle. There’s nostalgia in the style too, though for what and when is unclear, as though the narrator understands that the time and place for which he pines is nothing more than a idealised fiction. The result is a gentle, lilting sadness that gradually yet constantly tightens its grip on things, the narrator’s desperation rising through the minor chords.

B-side ‘Yes Praise, Mercy Yes’ is a plaintive song of resistance that is at once pessimistic and unyielding, as though understanding the futility of protest against power but at the same time drawing energy and purpose from it. Such a nuanced and wistful take on opposition and resilience is made all the more poignant by the fundamental simplicity of the track—relying as it does on mournful vocals and the wistful spirit of our time.

Good for a While is out now via Freeloader Free Press. and you can get the previous Stripmall Ballads albums from his website.

Cover art by Sadie Rapp

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