Noo Outlet 5—Love For One’s Country
The Telecaster Takeover, or lessons in why twang and pedal steel should be part of your own emotional repertoire. Also: a great read on the state of contemporary shoegaze and our second Brush of Note!
Hi Noo Friends :) I hope you’ve been enjoying this spring’s generally super pleasant advent. I realize this is something I’ve said before, but it is truly an arrestingly beautiful time to take stock of all the senses and functions you have in your perception. This may be smell’s biggest moment of the year, really! That is, if your allergies permit such enjoyment. Anyway, go for an extra walk or ride or whatever you like to do while the temps are mild. If it’s nice right this very second—this newsletter can totally wait.
Like humankind’s time on earth, “country”-inflected tunes occupy only a very recent spell of the greater span of my music listening, and my free-state blood long bristled at the general aesthetic of most things distinctly Southern. Perhaps you can relate; perhaps not. Either way, it should come as no surprise that the genre contains a whole host of human expressions, some of which we might find tasteless and unfortunate, sure, but others might shine a new kind of light on our hearts from a different sort of angle than we’re used to. Or maybe you already love this twangy stuff, in which case this is all just time-wastin’-hand-wringin.
Regardless, somehow we’re here at just the fifth edition of this little newsletter and I already find myself wanting to sell you on a suite of discs with arguably Southern-tinged roots. Shall we?
Music Recommendations
Greg Freeman—I Looked Out (2022)
{experimental} {alt-country} {Burlington}
Clickbait alert, but this is a criminally underrated, almost entirely unreported, album. Greg Freeman and his band seem to emerge fully formed on this debut LP, a perfect transmission of blues-and-folk inflected rock & roll music from Burlington, Vermont. These are big, ambitious songs that sail boldly across stormy seas, and the captain and crew on this ship show no signs of uncertainty in necessity of their passage, no matter how much their vessel is battered and their sails are straining.
The first thing to note is Greg Freeman’s smart, lyrical storytelling, conveyed by vocals that feel consistently present, immediate, and vital—truly this ship’s mast. Everything relationship and tale feels personal, crucial, and still smoldering in the glowing coals of this heart. The next thing I really notice here is what I might describe as “lucid grandeur”. There is a very pronounced scope and scale to the record and many of its individual songs, with arrangements that tower and loom casting shadows over smaller figures, waves of noise that build, crest, crash and recede to once again reveal the still-bubbling sand. Greg’s band is stacked with smart musicianship and blessed with a rowdy spirit, like nonviolent coyotes in the chicken coop, or something in that direction. They toil, chant, and cheer through their instruments, channeling spirits into and around the vocals to steer the ship toward cathartic shores.
There are horns. There is slide guitar. There is cacophony. And it is right, riotous, and even righteous. If you have ever, ever had an ache in your heart or a pain in your soul (so,) I very much encourage you to let I Looked Out help work it out.
RIYL: Magnolia Electric Co, MJ Lenderman, Neutral Milk Hotel
Rec’d tracks: “Long Distance Driver” (slow jam), “Colorado” (the big rocker), “Come and Change My Body” (horn lovers special), “Souvenir Heart” (the fever swells), “Palms” (unlock this HEAVY HEAVER after listening to the full album)
Label: Bud Tapes
Waxahatchee—Tigers Blood (2024)
{alternative} {Kansas City}
If you ask me, Katie Crutchfield has been on a roll for well over a decade now. She’s been beloved in the indieworld through albums of restless introspection and grunge-inflected, late-90s rock, but the alt-country sound she embraced with 2020’s Saint Cloud has garnered her some much-deserved broader recognition. In retrospect, it really was a bold move, leaning hard into something twangy, lucid, and earnest that did not seem in line with the style of the moment in history, but its clarity struck deftly in the early throes of a world trussed by COVID, reckoning with skeletons of the national closet, and serious election year fatigue—it was a heavy breath of fresh air, and an instant classic.
I was going to write about Saint Cloud here, but as much as I still cherish that one, Tigers Blood feels like the more important album for the summer to come, and I hope to impress that upon anyone here who has yet to start adding cuts from this to their own playlists. And maybe encourage y’all to go see her on tour? Let’s not forget that getting to experience live performances is a gift we didn’t have back not so very long ago, when Saint Cloud came out!
Indeed, presence and gratitude show up a lot on this album, where Crutchfield manages to capture the glow of golden hour lighting and lingering lightning bugs of the long-days-warm-nights season. The lawn-chair mood is pronounced, but the lyrics aren’t exactly painting dewey-eyed, bucolic scenes. Sober and settled into a Kansas-City-area home with her partner (Kevin Morby), she’s still clearly in tune with the slings and arrows common to any life, and the honest wrestling is appreciated. She and new-collaborator MJ Lenderman celebrate perfect imperfection in the (arguably perfect) lead single for the album “Right Back to It”, a song that’s already a familiar, dependable keeper, sure to warm truthful hearts for decades to come. “Bored” is a delight for fans of her rowdier, angstier guitar rock—a self-assured denunciation of something that you’re much better off without. “Lone Star Lake” has a satisfyingly bubbly soft banjo backdrop like afternoon sun on dust hanging in the air, and it’s accompanied by perhaps the simplest twangy Telecaster lead guitar part I can recall, nodding along to a mood of understanding and admiration, but as with the rest of the album, this is not just a simple romantic victory lap song, but something a little torn up, messy, and all the more beautiful for it. She’s worked hard at her music and her life, and isn’t interested in glossing over the struggle. May that noble fight and peace-loving fire be something we all kindle within.
RIYL: Lucinda Williams, Angel Olsen, Big Thief
Rec’d tracks: “Right Back to It”, “Bored”, “Lone Star Lake”
Label: Anti
MJ Lenderman—MJ Lenderman (2019)
{country} {slowcore} {Asheville}
MJ’s been hot recently, playing with Southern indie rock darlings Wednesday, putting out a pretty darn well-received solo album last year, and even singing and playing electric guitar on the new Waxahatchee album (above), but this 2019 thing is the record that actually really sold me on the guy. I’m going to say it right up front: there’s a lot of Jason Molina in this, the way there’s a lot of Elliott Smith in that Greg Mendez album. These, I think fans of those forebears will find, are not points of detraction when it comes to these contemporaries. If Songs: Ohia or Magnolia Electric Co ever hit for you, check this out; you can stop reading right now. If you don’t know those bands, let me try a little harder.
This is downtrodden-but-resolute, emphatic, Southern-blues-steeped rock and roll, put on record with the feel and track lengths of a live show replete with long-form jams. Average song length clocks at about seven minutes, but nothing this band does drags a bit, only takes its sweet, sweet time. They express patience and manage gentleness and finesse in some passages that might just be heavy, forceful in less-sure hands. There’s aching and pain, wist and yearning, and a whole lot of gorgeous string bending and, as is the style, slide guitar. And some woodwinds! That’s right, this thing has dynamics and range, lushness in many forms. Disclaimer: there’s a lot of A Guy Singing The Blues. It’s still kind of new to me, and I won’t expect it to be something just any given person is used to hearing—and especially an hour and two minutes of it. That said, if that’s the mood, I think this should really hit.
RIYL: Magnolia Electric Co, Wednesday, DUSTER??, Greg Freeman
Rec’d tracks: “Come Over”, “Heartbreak Blues”, “Basketball #1”
Label: Sub-Fi or maybe Dear Life?
Noo Sampler
As usual, here are the links to the playlist if you’d like to hear the recommended tracks from albums featured in this and prior editions of Noo Outlet.
Misc Reading
It’s impossible for the music industry and the media involved to fairly cover every great album coming out, and I acknowledge the valiant struggle being fought just to sort of keep up.
That said, as far as I can find, the only major outlet that covered the Greg Freeman 2022 album at all was Stereogum, where it was buried about 30 paragraphs deep into Eli Enis’s extremely excellent roundup column “The New Wave of American Shoegaze”. I believe Greg F (above) deserves more coverage AND I believe that article is an absolute treasure trove for anybody that its title even remotely intrigues.
Or, if you’ve been really good and read at least several of the words written above, you can skip the (genuinely excellent) context provided by Enis’s writing and just check out the playlist here.
Our Second Brush of Noote
Next one here in the BoN series comes to me by extremely good fortune. I was riding out to Levallois-Peret, the Parisian suburb that is home to Cycles Alex Singer, when I stopped dead in my tracks at what I saw to my right:
Despite its simple appearance, this was no droguerie ordinaire, mes amis. Upon closer inspection, I knew I’d happened upon something very special.
This place was a serious brushhaven. I’ll spare you all the pictures (brushfreaks: DM for the goods), but it housed a whole host of cleaners, spray bottles, leather creams, doormats, sponges, spools, feather dusters, rug beaters, bar soaps… seriously just straight heat for those who adore or at least revere and respect maintenance. The only visible employee was the proprietor herself, a woman who clearly knew what the heck was up with regard to all of these things. We spoke for a bit about the well-known-and-oft-bemoaned decline of interest in taking care of garments, the general bummer of fast fashion going far beyond clothes and affecting cabinetry, furnishings, et cet. Anyway, she was great, not even mad—just disappointed. I asked her about a brush that caught my eye, and she gave me a very, very hearty endorsement of…
The Illest Clothes Brush, by Burstenhaus Redecker
Pig bristles, bronze wire core, oiled pearwood handle. This is no-doubt-pro mode. The bronze bristles seemed insane to me, and the shop lady concurred it struck her as wild too, but insisted it’s beyond just okay for wool, but even cashmere. She says it helps remove pilling. Crazy. I haven’t hit that point yet, but damn this thing TAKES CARE OF BUSINESS pulling hair and lint and even some sorts of spills right off your clothes. I’m very glad I took the chance on this, and it’s made it very quickly into my top tier of most-treasured brushes. Probably top three, but definitely top five. I wanted to link out to this particular store, but probably unsurprisingly, their website isn’t especially functional. It’s “article no. 447000” from Redecker, wherever you find it.
Nootes & Addendum
That Cindy Lee show I mentioned in NooO#4 was, as hoped, super good, and the new album only continues to grow in strength with repeat spins. I heard rumors this may be the last album and tour for Cindy Lee! West Coast folks, I hope you caught them coming through your town; Midwest + East Coasters—check it out, and be sure you get there in time for Freak Heat Waves, who brought a very sick Manchester-type vibe with a solid set of some mid-tempo trip-hop-esque chunes that the crowd at Thee Stork Club was absolutely, visibly feeling.
C’est tout pour l’instant
I wanted to talk about the mockingbird that’s taken up residence by my bedroom window, but I am once again at the email length limit and that can totally wait. Thanks for reading! —Alex