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The version of "I'm Going Home" on Ganesh's comp is actually taken from the Cold Mountain ST. It's really not a bad little record—an odd one, though; it's clear that the studio was obviously angling for another O Brother Where Art Thou-style crossover hit, but the material is either too mannered (Elvis Costello's pseudo-parlor ballad "The Scarlet Tide") or too raw (shape-note hymns, campfire ur-bluegrass) to get any radio play.
In either case, it's a self-consciously pre-modern kind of music—meant to emulate the sound of an era when music was performance-based and "immediate"—as opposed to O Brother proto-pop universe, where the Soggy Bottom Boys could sing into a can and folks from five counties around could hear the results.
Some interesting songwriting exercises, though: I've made a bit of study of parlor songs from the Victorian era back to Stephen Foster, and Costello writes a pretty convincing simulacrum. The Sting track is another story—with its self-conscious archaisms ("You Will Be My Ain True Lover," indeed), as well as its use in the film, it seems to exist less on a literal level—that is, as music that might be performed in this film's time period—as a soundtrack to the character's emotional states. It sounds like witchcraft, like a pagan incantation, like a woman crazy in love literally willing her man to return home safe. I like it, actually.
The Jack White stuff is a mixed bag. On the traditional tunes he sounds excellent—his vocal on "Wayfaring Stranger" is startlingly raw and unaffected. The song that he wrote, though, sticks out like a sore thumb: it's shockingly modern, operating in a confessional, emotionally intimate mode utterly alien to the time period—not just post-Civil War, but post-Dylan. It doesn't help that it's, y'know, not very good, either.
But yeah, decent disc: better than the movie, which I thought overwrought piffle.
Sixteen Horsepower have a bunch of albums, actually. I'd recommend Low Estate, which finds the group expanding from three members to four, which dramatically opens up the sound (it doesn't hurt that it's produced by John Parish, who did wonders for PJ Harvey). It's a bit of a slow grower, but it really works. There's this weird aura of menace around even their most upbeat stuff—for frontman David Eugene Edwards, imagine the banjo boy from Deliverance grown up and fronting the Bad Seeds: intimations of a taste for violence, and a deep ambivalence towards sex twinned with an obsessive religiosity. Even after many listenings, I'm still not sure whether Edwards's inbred God-botherer routine is genuine, or just a knowing schtick. That ambiguity makes for spooky, wrong fun. |
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