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Liner Notes

This is the debut of "Liner Notes," Richmond.com's new CD review column. The mission is to highlight national bands who put out records of high quality, but who, for whatever reason, are criminally underexposed -- hidden gems, the needle in a haystack, that kind of thing. Feel free to pass along tips on bands you think are deserving of our praise. We'll listen.

 "Ten Thousand," Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir

Getting to Agnostic Mountain involves some soul searching. The approach runs beyond the graveyard bearing the tombs of blues greats, where Brother Claude Ely is the caretaker.

 

You'll have to pass through the scrap metal yard, and is that … yes, that is Tom Waits manning a car crusher. Despite these good omens, life's journey is arduous, and faith is sometimes difficult to muster. Just as things begin to look dire, you come across a gospel choir busking under a tree beside the road leading up the mountain.

 

The music is rawboned and visceral, the instrumentation about as traditional as it gets -- guitars, banjo, harmonica, upright bass and drums. Even so, it sometimes sounds like a junkyard symphony, with metal-on-metal slide guitar and someone keeping time on the hubcap from an old jalopy. There is gutbucket hollering.

 

Perhaps this is because they are doubters in salvation from upon high, and prefer to work it out for themselves.

 

They could be the jug band at a hobo funeral, the playing and singing are that loose, although they are mighty proficient players. But they are unconcerned with appearances and one gets the impression they value blood and guts feeling over high falutin' contrivance.

 

These are the four rough and ready members of the Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir . They recently released their third CD, "Ten Thousand." Although they hail from Calgary in Alberta, they have obviously spent some time roaming the badlands of American folk music forms, and perhaps a few smoky barrooms along the way.

 

The earliest, rawest bluesmen, like Charlie Patton, Big Joe Williams and Fred McDowell , laid down grooves deeper than a Mississippi furrow. The Agnostics have surely listened to their share of early blues, and mountain high lonesome pickers like Dock Boggs and Roscoe Holcombe as well.

 

The CD contains three covers and 11 originals. Lest you think they are simply retrofitting the lyrical terrain of old blues, listen to "You Got It Wrong," which riffs on the folly of our current president.

 

It says a whole lot about their confidence and mastery that they make songs by Son House , Sleepy John Estes and the great Cajun musician Dewey Balfa their own.

 

"Empire State Express," for example, is one of Son House's signature songs, and many have attempted versions of it with varying degrees of success. The Agnostics strip the song down to its skeleton, and then make it jakeleg its way back up the mountain.

  

The Agnostics tour Europe frequently, but they have no tour dates in the US, which is a shame. They play with the grit, ferocity and passion of any great punk band, and seeing them live would be something to experience.

 

For those who like their music raw and muscular, this is about as good as it gets. They may be short on salvation, but they are smothered in hallelujah. Very highly recommended. 

 "Little Amber Bottles,"  Blanche

While the Agnostics put themselves at the mercy of the natural elements, Detroit's Blanche is most comfortable in the parlor, and their doubts are less about faith and salvation, than they are about the darker reaches of human nature.

 

Their first CD, "If You Can't Trust the Doctors …" , was excellent, and contained the song "Do You Love Me." If life were fair, this song would become a duet classic for the ages. It belongs on the same jukebox as Johnny and June , George and Tammy , Porter and Dolly and Ernest and Loretta .

 

So, I was chary of holding out high expectations for their new offering, "Little Amber Bottles."

 

Blanche is the brainchild of Dan John Miller , who writes and sings most of the songs, and his duet partner and wife Tracee Mae. Miller was a former band mate of Jack White , who added some guitar to Blanche's first record. White called on members of Blanche to back Loretta Lynn on what became her fine record, "Van Lear Rose."

 

Banjo player Little Jack Lawrence plays with White in the Raconteurs. His song, "O Death Where is Thy Sting?", a spare bluegrass lament, is one of the highlights on Little Amber Bottles.

 

Dan and Tracee Mae acted in "Walk the Line" (the film biography of Johnny Cash), appearing as Mr. and Mrs. Luther Perkins. Blanche also played on a Charlie Louvin record, and sat in with him on several live dates.

The secret weapon here is Feeny the steel guitarist, who plays with an exquisite mixture of passion and good taste. Restraint is a general hallmark of their sound.

 

Blanche definitely has a fetish about antiquation. They dress in depression-era costumes, and both the music and the lyrics seem dusted with age. They don't do retro mimicry though.

 

They cover an obscure Rolling Stones song, but it ends up wholly their own, a fragile and haunted thing, a transistor-radio song in a digital age. It's stripped down, like the rawest of emotions.

 

Some nostalgia acts studiously set about sounding old. Blanche sounds timeless, not of any specific time period. You'll hear strains of old-timey, folk and country, of the type you might hear on Harry Smith's "Anthology of American Folk Music."

 

They may sing of death and despair, but the members of Blanche have strong backs and stout legs and even if they go down, they aren't staying down. Spare, haunting, beautifully fragile -- this is ghost-country for any age. So far, one my top ten for 2008. Highly recommended.