THE RAGBIRDS
The Threshold and the Hearth
Rock Ridge Music
* * * *
It’s hardly late-breaking news that musical
genres are collapsing at the speed of a North Korean housing development. It’s
musical succotash these days, though far too many musicians mash things simply
because they can, and in ways as aurally bland as lima beans and canned corn.
Thank goodness there are bands like The Ragbirds that add tasty ingredients.
This Ann Arbor-based quintet is an indie pop/folk rock/world music hybrid and
its fifth album, The Threshold and the
Hearth, is its best yet.
Evocations of Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel
spring to mind, though its anchor is the dulcet-toned Erin Zindle, who wields
fiddles, mandolins, and accordions to provide fiery contrast to her calming voice.
The Ragbirds are unusual in that they are percussion heavy. Erin’s brother, T.
J. Zindle, provides acoustic and electric guitar but her husband, Randall
Moore, lays down doumbek, tabla, and other percussion; Jon Brown adds a
conventional drum kit, and Dan Jones is on bass—whenever he too isn’t playing
some sort of drum. Songs such as “Cosmos,” “The Bottomless Heart,” and “TheCurse of Finger Pointing” have definite West African influences—both in their
sunny, exuberant feel and in Zindle’s fingerstyling. (Many West African rhythms
now played on guitar are derived from the kora.)
Optimism reigns on this album, no matter what
musical traditions The Ragbirds mine. And they mine many. The aforementioned
“Cosmos,” for example, also sports some Zindle fiddle work that is both jazzy
and quasi-Celtic. She switches to the squeeze box for “Good Time to be Born,”
in which her goes-down-easy voice moves us from bleakness—“There’s a stranger
with a cart full of useless stuff”—to universal themes of shared humanity: “My
own shopping cart is full of compromise/There is always peace, there is always
war/But beauty’s always being born.” Considered arrangement of material also keeps
us on our toes and in touch with our better angels. Check out the way the last
eight tracks roll. In “Sometimes Honestly,” Zindle admits that constant honesty
is its own burden and intones, “Luck is just a choice you make.” This is
followed by the harder edged “Alleyway Saints” in which T.J.’s electric guitar
is fluid but edgy; then it’s introspective piano for “Strange Weather,” Erin’s
slow, personal exploration of how a couple negotiates everyday life, with
changeable weather the central metaphor. “Tough Love” is a natural follow up
with its splashes of energetic mando, its clipped pacing, and a soulful chorus.
That emotional/musical pattern is followed
again for the next four songs, my favorites of which were “We Carry This
Place,” which felt like a contemplative update of themes Joni Mitchell explored
in “Circle Game;” and “Little Ties,” which is folky, vaguely Appalachian, has a
sing-along feel, and a fiddle part that’s what you’d get if you put some hand
jive to strings. Most of the album’s songs are about renewal and I felt
refreshed from listening. They call themselves The Ragbirds, but there’s
nothing shabby about them. –Rob Weir
No comments:
Post a Comment