Soft acoustic folk music which acknowledges both Celtic and American roots.
DUG is the debut project from Jonny Pickett and Lorkin O’Reilly. The latter moved to New York state from Scotland as a teenager, and he coaxes rather than bellows his lyrics in an accent which recalls other American folkies like Jeffrey Lewis or Iron & Wine.
Opening instrumental ‘Cold Frost’, with its fiddle and drone, sets the mood for an album of folk tunes which sometimes employ woodwind and brass. The title track is as welcoming as you’d expect for a song that describes “a never-ending party in the sky”. It has a stomp-clap beat and call-and-response choruses with gang vocals, while the mention of “ketamine and beer” helps position the album as alt-folk rather than folk of the straight and gentle kind. The similarly impassioned ‘Live Long Day’ begins with a groovy riff and, thanks to its string interjections, has the feel of ‘Kashmir’ by Led Zeppelin.
In a knowing manner, the pair offer both ‘Katie’ and ‘Katie Cruel’. The former is an uptempo lament on which O’Reilly claims he is “a decent man”, the latter a droning mood piece with a slide guitar solo. The old Scottish tune, which has been performed by Karen Dalton and Bert Jansch, documents how the buoyant “roving jewel” has become a downtrodden traveller on “the boggy mire”. The chorus sounds like a sphinx’s riddle: “If I was where I would be, then I’d be where I am not.”
This is one of a few mysterious elements across the album. ‘I Reside’ (“where the wild things roam”) is a soft song which seems to be narrated by an unseen spirit; the guitar part is spindly, and helps make the song impressionistic and enveloping for the listener. This leads into album highlight ‘In Memoriam’, which has the feel of ‘Buckets of Rain’ by Bob Dylan; it namechecks orator Thomas Paine, poet Hart Crane and TV shows ‘The Wheel’ and ‘The Price Is Right’. These are programmes the narrator’s late mother was watching, “wrapped in ephemeral light”, which recalls the opening image of the “golden sun”. We also hear about “communist bees”, which is a very assonant pairing of words.
On the philosophical ‘Wheel of Fortune’, O’Reilly’s rather strained vocals deliver a lyric full of imagery (“a foxhole in the fallow ground”) and emotive vocabulary such as “second-rate salvation” and “exponentially backwards”. The picaresque ‘Big Sundown’, throughout which a fiddle plays over a single chord, has the young Australian protagonist desperate for independence, mowing lawns and laying roads. The hard-working narrator of ‘When The Days Cool Down’ is beaten by the foreman for whom he is paying off a debt. The old-style folk of Rhiannon Giddens provides a comparison here.
The sparse ‘Fields of Plenty’, which is almost a lullaby, rattles through a typical life from school to work to financial distress (“the debt bought credit and the credit bought the homes”), set to a pentatonic melody, unison vocals and accompanying fiddle line. ‘Cumberland Gap’, with its addictive wee melody, continues in the lineage of all those other songs about the location, with plenty of whoops, hollers and handclaps in spite of the fatalism of “If I die in my boots, tell my old man I’ll be seeing him soon!” ‘Good Time People’ is equally danceable even as it depicts a protagonist who goes “a-drinkin’ and a-druggin’ and a-ramblin’” and who complains about empty pocketbooks and a finger-wagging mama.
Closing track ‘Jubilee’ is an understated toast to living in and seizing the moment, be it “swinging at apparitions” or making “brand new origin stories”. If you don’t listen to much music in the unamplified folk tradition, this is a fine example of the form to enjoy.
