An adventurous and largely successful foray into left-field indie country.
Originally from Texas and raised in a “god-fearing” Pentecostal family, Nashville-based Joelton Mayfield was enveloped in the church throughout his formative years, his dissolution with their ways coinciding with his growing awareness of songwriters such as Sufjan Stevens, David Bazan and Jeff Tweedy. He eventually upped sticks to Nashville and spent around a decade shuffling and playing on the outskirts of the music scene.
“Crowd Pleaser”, his debut album, was recorded in a friend’s barn in Alabama with Mayfield and a large cast of musician friends transporting their gear and outfitting the barn with stacks of rugs to absorb the echo from the concrete floors. All set to record, Mayfield’s romantic partner up and quit him. Grist for the mill, perhaps.
Anyhow, “Crowd Pleaser” is an ambitious debut album. It skirts on the edge of “indie country” on several of the songs, in particular the up tempo ‘Turpentine (You Know the One)’ which kicks off with some deliciously nasty slide guitar and features quotes from Wilco and The Mountain Goats while ‘Now’ opens as a delicate, slow placed number before building up a slow head of steam with pedal steel and guitar entwined in a cosmic country finale. ‘Baltimore’, meanwhile, is a grand storytelling ballad which recalls the more esoteric singer-songwriters of the Laurel Canyon era, while ‘Pretty Linda’ certainly harks back to those days, a simple tale sung with some heartache and adorned by some swell pedal steel playing.
Elsewhere Mayfield is more adventurous with the opening song ‘Red Beam’ punctuated by bursts of static and sampled sounds while the following track, ‘The Shore’, features a robotic drum beat leading one to presume the song is going to wander down an electronic avenue but Mayfield cleverly adds his band members gradually to the song, which eventually sounds somewhat akin to the smog ridden songs which populated John Murry’s “The Graceless Age”. Mayfield’s religious background is addressed in ‘Jacob Dreamed A Staircase’, a simple, primarily acoustic number, and in ‘Blame’, which finds him, lyrically, somewhat directionless, seeking a way out of his formative years.
With influences ranging from Jackson Browne to Clem Snide and the aforementioned Wilco on show here, “Crowd Pleaser” is an album which deserves to be investigated.
