Worried Songs Vinyl, CD & Tape 8 Items

Old Saw, the enigmatic New England collective led by Henry Birdsey (Tongue Depressor), return with their third long-playing record, Dissection Maps. It is not enough to trace the fields. The choreo-cartographic demands the casting of stone, a grassfire, a carnival; something with which to rupture the horizontality of existence and imagine the vertical.Earth is the eighth morning, folded against the week's work. The field is a line drawing of oblivion. The house is a forest in the shape of a womb. America is a quarry in the image of god.(Aidan Patrick Welby – 2024) “The band captures the American stretch, the spaces in-between and the hollowness that haunts us along those routes…fades the radio to static to let the nothingness linger among the soul.” (Raven Sings the Blues) “ evokes an ambience of prayer-like solemnity that celebrates something decidedly terrestrial, what the label describes 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.” (Various Small Flames)

Prairiewolf make easy listening music for an age of fracture. They almost do it in spite of themselves. No one can seriously question the head music bona fides of the members of this Colorado-based trio. Guitarist Stefan Beck has already assembled a formidable discography of jewel-toned guitar zone-outs under his Golden Brown moniker. And keyboardist and guitarist Jeremy Erwin and bassist Tyler Wilcox have both made their reputations as chroniclers of the vast world of out music. Erwin helms the indispensable Heat Warps blog, a performance-by-performance archive of Miles Davis’s labyrinthine electric period. And Wilcox has been covering the ragged edges of psychedelia and experimental rock at Aquarium Drunkard and other publications, not to mention his own virtual basement for heads, the great bootleg blog Doom and Gloom from the Tomb. These guys come by it honestly. And yet, given their backgrounds, Prairiewolf’s self-titled debut last spring was remarkably free of face-melters, brown acid blowouts, and ascendant spiritual jazz odysseys. Instead, they dropped a record of beautiful, elegant, low-key cosmic groovers that sounded like the piped-in background music to a resort hotel on Jupiter. It was an unlikely psychedelia, brocaded with mid-twentieth century sonic threading from the hi-fi era: vintage synthesizers, smears of spaghetti western, luxe tropical details, the faint schmaltz of space age pop. Imagine something like a Harmonia residency in the airport lounge. And yet somehow it all worked brilliantly. Prairiewolfbecame last summer’s cool-down standard.

After a year woodshedding around Colorado’s Front Range region, the Prairiewolf boys have fired up their trusty Korg Sr-120 drum machine for another outstanding collection of suborbital exotica. The appropriately titled Deep Time operates in its own chronology, unspooling at its unhurried pace. All its incongruous period and stylistic references—the new age pulses, Hawaiian steel, shaggy hippie rambles, lysergic guitar spirals, and orchestral synthesizer flourishes—float atop the album’s own singular temporality. Deep Time makes its own time. From the moment Beck folds his slide guitar, origami-like, into a sound resembling the call of gulls on the tranquil album opener, “Peach Blossom Paradise,” there is a sense of departure from everyday life. The shimmering “Lighthouse” has a similar sunbaked nonchalance, like an afternoon passed day-drinking in a seaside bar. That they named their lush, kaleidoscopic downtempo track “The Meander” pretty much says it all. The ranging, propulsive “Saying Yes to Everything” seems like a nod in the direction of Rose City Band’s brand of wookie krautrock. And the motorik noir of “Demon Cicadas in the Night” also goes hard. Beck and Erwin’s intertwined guitar jam on the eerie album standout “The Cold Curve” evolves into something that sounds like primitive computer music. A genteel bassline from Wilcox on another album highlight, “Revisionist Mystery,” sets the stage for a loopy space jazz turn from guest clarinetist Matt Loewen of Rayonism. The title of post-rock cowboy tune “Another Tomorrow” might refer to the alternative future that so many critics heard in the music of Prairiewolf’s first album. Or it might simply refer to the persistence of time, however deep.

Either way, I’m thankful for the way Prairiewolf make each of their tunes a little oasis or sanctuary, each subsisting according to its own crystalline little logic for a few minutes. It is no simple task to filter out the omnipresent anger and anxiety of everyday life these days. But Prairiewolf are out here making it seem easy.

Brent S. Sirota

Featuring contributions from Jordan Tice (of Hawktail), Jay Bellerose, Harrison Whitford, Rayna Gellert, Dylan Day, Mark Goldenberg, Rich Hinman and Robert Bowlin, CRK, a self-titled affair, finds Cameron Knowler at an exciting crossroads between American tradition and forward looking guitar soli - toeing the line between personal regionalism and the universality of landscape memory. CRK draws on the history and geography of Knowler’s birthplace of Yuma, Arizona- a border town known for its lettuce production and defunct territorial prison. In line with the regional ethos of the composer Frantz Casseus and the minimalism of Bruce Langhorne, this instrumental guitar record launches into a world of desert sun, propane tanks, dark jail cells, and the verdant Colorado. Knowler ferries listeners across a sensitively crafted world with deft, understated playing, pushing the current of instrumental acoustic music forward through lush original compositions, while keeping an eye on tradition with his singular arrangements of old time fiddle tunes. With what many describe as the closest thing to the right hand of Norman Blake, Knowler’s delivery also nods to the work of creative outsiders Terry Allen and David Rawlings. With this work, Knowler sonically illuminates untold stories of the Sonoran, lending a voice to the pictorial canon made famous by Dorothea Lange and western films such as “3:10 to Yuma.” There is a sense of interiority to the record as well, Knowler says, noting that he “grew up isolated, unschooled in a desert with very little contact with children my own age.” He only returned to his hometown recently to revisit places held in memory, and CRK stands as a direct result of unpacking those landscapes coded with personal darkness. By creating an outward-facing work of art, Knowler strives to “make sandcastles out of grief” and emblazon the diorama of his youth. With CRK, the world receives a sound poem, a memory palace that stands as a document of both personal grief and acceptance of the many dimensions of a place. We hear the sweeping landscapes of the Sonoran desert, and the darkness housed therein, even in The Sunniest Place on Earth.

Bob Martin began what would become his final studio album in a beach front condominium in Seabrook, New Hampshire in May 2008. The recordings sat dormant for the next 13 years. This album began when James Endeacott of 1965 Records sent Jerry David DeCicca to Charlottesville, Virginia to meet Martin, hoping to reissue Martin’s 1972 debut on RCA Records, Midwest Farm Disaster. DeCicca, who had co-produced the final recordings of folk-funk, Heartworn Highways’ songwriter, Larry Jon Wilson, for 1965 Records (and later reissued by Drag City Records) had played the LP for Endeacott several months earlier. Midwest Farm Disaster is that rare album that feels joyful and yet full of sorrow; Martin’s Lowell, Massachusetts voice yearning with a backbeat from Nashville session musicians, Norman Putnam and Kenny Buttrey, the later fresh from his “Heart of Gold” session. The reissue never happened, as Martin was already in the process of rescuing his forgotten masterpiece for his own self-release. But Bob and Jerry’s breakfast led to Martin’s daughter, Tami, hiring DeCicca and engineer, Jake Housh, who also worked on the Wilson album, to capture her father in a similar manner. After Midwest Farm Disaster, a second album for RCA was under contract, but when a record executive there wanted Martin to put his girlfriend’s poetry to music, Bob bailed on the deal. Martin continued to tour around with a pickup band until advice from his father resonated, and he left the road to raise a family. Bob worked as an educator, teaching math and computers, and even founded a school in West Virginia that taught traditional art forms in Appalachia like fiddle playing and weaving. Bob returned to the studio in 1982 to record Last Chance Rider for the June Appal, a label that focused on music from Appalachia and had released albums by Nimrod Workman, Si Kahn, and Betty Smith. In the late-90’s, Bob returned with two self-released CDs, The River Turns The Wheel and Next to Nothin’ that continued capturing stories of people and places that exhale their own mythologies. He wrote novels, cared for his family, and taught, and played only the occasional gig. But it’s this album, Seabrook, that finds Bob at his most wise and wistful; the histories of Lowell and his own life hanging longest in his voice. New songs about the West Virginia coal mines (“Three Miles Beneath This Mountain”) and living in an extended stay motel (“Midway Motel”) sit beside new and more urgent interpretations of late period classics, like “My Father Painted Houses,” and, for the first time, one of his oldest songs he didn’t record for Midwest Farm Disaster called “Give Me Light”, along with “Stay Awhile Sunshine,” which he had been singing to his family for decades and features Gary Mallaber (“Tupelo Honey”) on vibraphone. After DeCicca and Housh returned from the beach with Bob, they all agreed to flesh out the songs with other instrumentation to present as a draft for what the new record could be with a little more money and time. This was the time when the epilogue of musicians’ work was still of interest to labels. Everyone with a guitar over 65 was still in the shadow of Rubin’s Cash, and recent records by Loretta Lynn, Charlie Louvin, Soloman Burke, and Candi Staton were both fashionable and profitable. But Martin wasn’t as well known and his classic debut was only licensed for a limited physical release, proving him a difficult sell. Labels passed or made unreasonable requests, and Bob eventually lost interest; instead, choosing to record a solo acoustic live album, Live at the Bull Run, and tour Europe for the first time. There were hiccups of hope, like a feature in No Depression and a song in the TV show, Justified, but the new recordings quickly began collecting dusk. In the meantime, DeCicca continued producing records for other older artists, like Ed Askew’s For the World (Tin Angel), two Chris Gantry releases (Drag City), Will Beeley’s Highways and Heart Attacks (Tompkins Square), and reissue projects for the Numero Group (Elyse Weinberg, Rob Galbraith). Then, in 2021, DeCicca received a call from Bob’s daughter, Tami, giving him permission to finish the album as Bob’s health was failing. Upon revisiting the tracks with Housh, the album needed very little tidying up and the songs were completed with DeCicca’s former bandmates, The Black Swans, who had previously played on the original mock up back in 2008. With new technology and a new perspective, the album was completed, but not before Martin’s health had deteriorated more. Bob Martin passed away September 21, 2022 at 80 years of age. Sadly, he never heard his final album.

Inspired in equal parts by fatherhood, nature and quietude, 'Slither, Soar and Disappear' was born on Josh Kimbrough's back porch in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, as his young son rested, where the bucolic intimacy of the natural world found its way into his nylon and steel string guitar playing, resulting in this cycle of beautiful compositions. Accompanied by a roster of talented musicians, Josh's guitar work is accompanied and complimented by banjo, flute, strings, mandolin, double bass and drums, the results bringing to mind a host of artists from Jansch, Drake and Fahey, to the Penguin Café Orchestra and Mike Hurley. "Fatherhood," Josh reflects, "I was finding, forces one to abandon parts of the self--a heavy proposition in a society that emphasizes individualism. Cultural critic, farmer, and novelist, Wendell Berry in his book, A Native Hill, muses: 'In order to know the hill, it is necessary to slow the mind down to the hill's pace.' This principle applied to me at the time as I was adapting to a new speed of life and striving to be present as a father. On the deck, as my mind slowed down to take in the chirps and wind gusts, these songs began to blossom. "A truly beautiful album emphasising the splendour of the outside world and the gentle pace of life many of us have found ourselves in over the last year and a half. Originally released digitally on Tompkins Square, Worried Songs gives these songs the vinyl treatment.

Joseph Allred, Or Occasionally Known As His Alter-Perspective, Blind Faulkner, Is A Tennessee-Born Multi-Instrumentalist, Now Residing In Massachusetts, Who Has Received Critical Acclaim For His Seemingly Endless Slew Of Wonderful Records, Most Of Which Showcase His Talent For All Things Stringed. Here, Worried Songs Presents The Initially Private-Pressed Masterwork, 'The True Light', Taking Its Name From The Gospel Of John, A Haunting Lament For Solo-Harp Guitar. Recorded Shortly After Receiving The Instrument, 'The True Light' Documents His Exploration Of The Harp Guitar. The Five Songs Found On 'The True Light' Bleed Like A River, Flowing From One To The Next In Waves Of Immense Beauty, Melancholia And Yearning, Reflecting On Spirituality And Belonging In Its Many Forms. Strong Basho Vibes On This One, Yet, As Always, Joseph Expands And Transcends On The Ghosts Of Primitive-Past, Forging His Own Path. In Short, This Is The Real Deal. If You Don't Know Allred Already, You Will Soon." --Byron Coley, "Each Time I've Seen Joseph Allred Play A Concert, I've Choked Up. Whether Working In Improvisation Or Composition, For Harmonium, Stringed Instruments Or Voice, Their Music Reveals A Deep Knowledge Of Diverse Musical Idioms Secular And Religious, With The Sort Of Quiet Force That Comes From The Acquisition Of This Knowledge, And Their Performances Are Striking And Brave, Simultaneously Unadorned And Rich As To Suggest Collaborations With Realms Beyond Our Own. The True Light Retains These Qualities: Like Basho Or Rose, It's Uncompromising; Like Sacred Musics, Stately; Like The Music Of So Many American Masters, It Plows Ahead On Its Terms And Gives And Gives." - Eli Winter "_fierce, Raw And Deeply Moving." - Pop Matters "Multi-Instrumentalist Joseph Allred Had A Startling Answer For An Interviewer Who Recently Asked Him, "Who Are You?" "A Sick Man, A Spiteful Man, An Unattractive Man," Allred Said, Adding, "I Believe My Liver Is Diseased." In A Press Photo Depicting Him In A Dark, Funereal Suit A...

“Friends, they are my ticket out of this place I am in… feels like nothing more than a dirt bike vacation stop between Phoenix and San Diego.” Dirt Bike Vacation—for Worried Songs Records—explores the sonic world of the late amateur guitar player, Charles ‘Poppy Bob’ Walker, through a captivating set of instrumental songs made in the mid-1980s. Recorded on a single-track, Marantz field recorder, the project is a transportive document of Walker’s days spent as a meatpacking employee in Yuma, Arizona and the dailiness of that existence: driving to work, sitting in his backyard, walking around drunkenly, unwinding on the couch with a friend. These sketches, showing an experimental tendency, are surprisingly ahead of their time; some exhibit ad hoc tape delay (“Granite Bluffs,” “Goodbye Ymca”), while others make use of primitive overdubbing (“Continuation to Moon Doctor”). Not dissimilar to works such as Bruce Langhorne’s The Hired Hand soundtrack, Walker’s guitar playing is melodic, texturally rich and beautifully sober.

On a musical tour from Nashville to Los Angeles, musician-archivist, Cameron Knowler, uncovered these songs from a series of dusty cassette tapes housed at a branch of the Yuma County Library. Originally tipped off by cryptic metadata entries found through an online finding aid, Knowler requested a sound sample and was immediately drawn in by their eerie, yet hopeful nature: “I didn’t care what they sounded like at first, but once I heard just a few seconds, I had to find out everything I could about Charles, who he was, and if he was still alive.” As it turns out, the two had miraculously crossed paths over 20 years prior when Cameron was a young boy accompanying his mother, a gem trader, on a biyearly sojourn to Quartzsite, a town 80 miles north of Yuma:

“Charles, sitting down and smoking in a recliner, withdrawn, held what I now understand to be a mid-1990s Martin D-28 guitar. Unlike other old-timers, his instrument was sharply tuned and had a nice sound, even to my young and uncalibrated ears. Though his left hand showed signs of highly developed arthritis, his musical ideas were animated by a palpably deep understanding of fretboard anatomy, arrangement and harmony.”

Sorting through the index cards associated with these tapes, Knowler was able to gain a detailed sense of most recording’s provenance, whereabouts and time: Walker’s Datsun pickup truck chugging along boiling hot Interstate 80, the Marine Corps Air Station parking lot, the Eastern Wetlands on the banks of the Colorado River, a fishing trip to Martinez Lake. Trying to reduce the amount of his own subjectivities coloring the work, Cameron constructed titles and track sequences by borrowing information gleaned from Charles’ handwritten notes: “I tried to organize everything by time of day, giving the listener the sense of how a Yuma day might sound and feel like, and each song title—even the record itself—is borrowed from his own words.” This proved no small task, as many notecards had to be deciphered and then coupled with their native tapes which needed extensive restoration treatments.

The result is a project very much out of the blue, and one that is intensely personal to Knowler, having grown up in the same town under similar circumstances. “It feels like a part of my own journey as a guitarist reckoning with the defining marks of a gothic border town,” he remarks. “At the time I would’ve met Walker, I didn’t have much outside influence, but he has been in there all the while.” In their current form, the tracks combine to create a sonic journey that boldly contributes to the traditions of acoustic guitar soli, archival digs and field recordings all the same; most importantly, it is a creative document which shows a day-in-the-life of a man grappling with the human experience under a ubiquitous Yuma sun.