![]() ![]() These innovative melds put Hiss Golden Messenger in the company of contemporaries like Megafaun, Doug Paisley, and Lambchop, all acts who have lifted from the past with steady visions for the future. The sidewinding acoustic guitars of the instrumental "Dreamwood" rise from a haze of nocturnal field recordings, suggesting Sir Richard Bishop sitting in with the sounds of a surrounding swamp. ![]() Traces of funk and dub ripple warmly beneath the banjo of "Drummer Down" and the keyboard flourishes of "Jesus Shot Me in the Head", while "Super Blue (Two Days Clean)" washes psychedelic warmth gently over an incisive bar-rock clip. Instead, Poor Moon largely depends upon the band's ability to hide the seams of its polyglot proclivities. There's a beautiful bluegrass trot in the middle and a string-lined country-soul template at the end, but those are exceptions. Hiss Golden Messenger pairs an instant accessibility with careful complexity the hook of opener "Blue Country Mystic", for example, is inescapable, but the song's sudden twists and sprints and minute musical details provide a framework of constant unpredictability. It works: Poor Moon is a fantastic, on-repeat record that recalls the aesthetic risks and rewards of the best stuff produced by Laurel Canyon's singer-songwriters and, decades later, the stylistically daring musicians associated with New Weird America. By far the band's most developed effort, Poor Moon was recorded with a cast of 16 guitarists, string players, horn players, drummers, pickers, and singers and revisits several tunes from past Hiss Golden Messenger albums- in effect, funneling the band's widespread oeuvre into this one discrete moment. Poor Moon is the fourth Hiss Golden Messenger album, but it feels in a sense like a debut, or at least some grand curtain finally being pulled back. Taylor and New York multi-instrumentalist Scott Hirsch in the late 1990s, Hirsch and Taylor anchored San Francisco's the Court & Spark, an intriguing act that attempted to till the soil between indie rock and alt-country scenes long before listeners seemed so Fleet Foxes-ready. Hiss Golden Messenger is, at its core, Durham, N.C., songwriter M.C. ![]() This is new music that uses the past like a catapult- into songs that understand their pedigrees without kowtowing to them. ![]() Poor Moon thrives on an absolute Pan-American musical alchemy, where classic country and bar-band rock, pristine bluegrass and subversive funk whittle their own way into the same perfect grooves. For the last decade, after all, Tompkins Square has dug deep into both the past and present to deliver soulful music in all its numerous guises, whether that's meant box sets of astonishing gospel performances or the one-man-string-band exhortations of Frank Fairfield. Tompkins Square is one of the few extant imprints that could give Poor Moon a proper and permanent presence, or one with an aesthetic that fit not only Paradise of Bachelors but also Hiss Golden Messenger. Taylor is a steadying, comforting presence in a rudderless world, and 90 minutes in his company pass very quickly – even if he only scratches the surface of his voluminous songbook.Last week, the California-via-New York label Tompkins Square reissued Poor Moon on CD, giving an album that had quickly sold out in its original form a chance to benefit from wider distribution. As deep into the inky darkness as his lyrics might delve, his luminous melodies are redemptive, every warmly familiar strum a healing salve for the abrasions his introspection risks. Played solo and acoustic tonight, his songs are deceptively effortless, whether tracing fractured emotional faultlines (Lost Out in the Darkness, where he warns: “If I see the black dog it’ll kill me”), toying with Springsteen-esque visions of escape to the highway (Jenny of the Roses) or searching for “beauty in the broken American moment” (I Need a Teacher, his “anthem for public education”). (Perhaps she’ll appreciate its resonant, thoroughly unmawkish treatise on the redemptive powers of parenthood when she’s older.) He reveals that his new album was recorded under the spell of psychedelics, recommends the William Blake exhibition at Tate Britain and says his six-year-old daughter didn’t like the song he wrote for her, Happy Birthday, Baby. Alone beside a vase of flowers, looking like Ethan Hawke playing an artfully dishevelled literature professor, Taylor is drily avuncular, a natural between-song raconteur. ![]()
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