Panalure’s dusky folk and roots-rock songs have a way of expanding on themselves. The Milwaukee sextet specializes in intimate Americana, richly adorned with accordions, fiddles, saxophones or pedal steel guitars, depending on whatever mood the band is trying to strike. Sometimes, guitarist Michael De Boer explains, it’s a challenge keeping those tendencies in check and making sure the songs don’t get lost under the weight of their accompaniments.
The band kept things relatively scaled back on their 2014 debut, The Bones, a striking and stirring album with a road-weary, late-night feel, but for their sophomore album, Stories in the Third Person, they adopted a more maximalist approach, recruiting an outside producer for the first time: Mike Hoffmann of Semi-Twang.
“We wanted to make it a little bigger,” says De Boer. “There’s just a lot more instruments on it. Mike really had a vision for each song. When you hear the final album, there’s a lot of different found sounds throughout it and a lot of elements he added for the sequencing. His style is he just records tons of tracks and goes back and finds the best for every song, then kind of orchestrates them. He really looks for the most unique angle he can.”
The band—which also includes singer-songwriter-guitarist Fred Ziegler, bassist and songwriter Ken Hanson, singer Kari Hoff and more recent recruits Bob Jennings and Reggi Bordeaux, both of Paul Cebar Tomorrow Sound—can cover quite a bit of ground on their own, but for Stories, they also opened the door to guest collaborators. Janet Schiff of Nineteen Thirteen plays some cello, Frogwater’s Susan Nicholson sits in on fiddle, and Hoffman adds some of his own guitar. Most notably, a choir of local musicians lend their voices to “Theologian,” the most overtly gospel-minded song on a record that rarely strays too far from biblical themes of faith, death, sin and salvation.
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It’s hardly party music, De Boer admits, which is why the band gravitates toward venues like Anodyne Coffee in Walker’s Point—places that draw attentive music listeners. They played their last album release show there in 2015 on an unusual bill they shared with the storytelling collective Ex Fabula. For the new record’s release show at the same venue, the band has created “an artful installation” of found photographs and old family movies from the ’40s,’50s and ’60s that complement the album’s stories and themes. The visual accompaniment, De Boer says, is one of the perks of having so many band members with a background in design and art.
“It really does help on the design side,” De Boer says. “We always have good posters.”
Panalure play an album release show Saturday, Jan. 27 at Anodyne Coffee, 224 W. Bruce St., with Semi-Twang at 8 p.m. Admission includes a free download of the album.
