Crazy Arms by Pigeon Pit
Pigeon Pit’s fourth full-length, Crazy Arms, is also the punk-angled country and folk project’s first full-length to showcase its tour-tested six-member lineup. If the music reflects what the touring is like, then the sextet apparently sets out from and returns to Olympia, Washington in a couple VW vans previously used to transport weed and moonshine.
Previously and, maybe, recently: laying down the tracks in a friend’s basement, Pigeon Pit’s players (listed only by their first names) often sound as if they’re still riding a contact high from skunk smoke and alcohol fumes. They tumble through a dozen songs with raucous unconcern for technical issues like mic bleed or tape hiss.
Frontwoman Lomes Oleander might be the highest of all, singing as excitably as Bright Eyes leader Conor Oberst and in as reedy a pitch as Gordon Gano in the early days of Violent Femmes. She also gives a pleasurably drunken, pleasurably stoned wave to the verbose Americana poetry of Dylan and Springsteen.
She and her band build upon the lore of what those various influences have done: “Bad Advice” jolts the track list into motion with frantic acoustic strumming given a backdrop of calm by Bo’s fiddle; “Maddy’s Song” gives said banjo player a charmingly nervy spotlight for picking and warbling; and “Alone in the Basement” adds Jim’s distantly thoughtful pedal steel guitar to a roughly rocking cover of a Japanther song.
At its clearest—the final song, “Josephine County Blues,” feels and sounds tighter than most of the album does—Pigeon Pit could hold its own with Avett Brothers and outface the Lumineers. At its scruffiest, the band gives Crazy Arms the air of a hoedown that can be thrown anywhere from that friend’s basement to your nearest barnyard. Weed and moonshine optional.
Get Crazy Arms at Amazon here.
Paid link
|
|
