A quietly fiery masterpiece of liberated and liberating bluegrass.
Of all the different types of americana, bluegrass can be one of the most challenging to review – but some might say that’s an unintended consequence of one of its most elemental qualities. After all, like the earliest rockabilly and rock’n’roll, bluegrass was originally mainly intended to be a form of popular, grassroots entertainment, so it would typically rely heavily on formulaic, intentionally repetitive musical structures. Those predictable structures were great for keeping the dancehall public on side – most of whom were just there to dance, not focus too hard on the intricacies of the music – while simultaneously allowing musicians to show off their technical virtuosity, one of bluegrass’ stand-out features. But with lyrical originality often not a top priority either, compared to the americana genre in general, sometimes in traditional bluegrass it’s kind of hard to distinguish the differing virtues of individual songs as songs in themselves.
Fortunately, though, that’s not always the case, as Pacific Northwest-based bluegrass musician like Eli West shows on the ten tracks on his third solo album, “The Shape of a Sway.” On it, West isn’t just capable of producing some stunning material at the more conventionally sounding end of the bluegrass spectrum. But while he adheres to traditional bluegrass’ preference for semi-acoustic and acoustic format throughout the album, he’s also just as happy to move into much more experimental material as well.
The opening cover of Martin Gilmore’s ‘Away Out On The Sea’ has a fairly familiar structure to it, for example, with the fast-paced blazing away of intertwining harmonies between West on the banjo, guitar, mandolin and pedal steel and his bandmates, fiddler Patrick M’Gonigle and bassist Forest Marowitz, a riproaring joy to hear. But if ‘Away Out On The Sea’ would be a standout track on a ‘standard’ bluegrass album, what really allows “The Shape of a Sway” to move into a league of its own is the more open-ended formats of the next two tracks, ‘Rocks and Trees’ and ‘Spite and Love’. Often, previous reviewers of West have discussed how influences of his former employment as an architect are detectable in his music, and certainly some of the tracks on “The Shape of a Sway” are very obviously built on sturdy, down-home bluegrass foundations. But on others like his cover of Paul Simon’s ‘Hearts and Bones’, the sounds of the solo instruments become increasingly much more spartan and ethereal as the track continues, gradually moving into a wholly different dimension. ‘Hearts and Bones’ may be the longest song of the album by some margin, but the seven minutes and change just fly by.
It’s at points like these where you realise just how much of a landmark “The Shape of a Sway” shapes up to be, and the second half of the album continues to hammer home that idea. Each song is very much in the best bluegrass tradition of dazzling technical dexterity and unfussy prowess displayed by all the instrumentalists, but there’s never a point where you think it’s getting repetitive or self-indulgent. West’s singing isn’t overly dominant, but that allows for a very cohesive wholeness about the sound, too, and the willingness to mix very surreal lyrics on songs like ‘Spite and Love’ with much more straightforward material like the closer ‘I’d Like to Be a Train’ keeps your attention from fading.
The variety of the music and breathtaking skillfulness shown by all the musicians really help drive this album forward, boosted by the crisp handovers from one instrument to another, which lead the song onwards, and the sense you get that the players know how to bring the best out of each other. That old adage of first learning the rules before you can learn how to break them rings very true on “The Shape of a Sway”, given it shows both sides of the bluegrass tradition, the liberal newgrass and the conservative elements. But West’s ability to get those facets of the genre to complement each other so well and so interestingly on this album is arguably what makes it stand out the most of all.
