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‘A 6 part cosmic hobo’s dream suite for 23 string banjo… Metzger plucks, picks, bows and spins his way through a 40 minute odyssey making for his most ambitious and adventurous musical trip to date.’
Terrific solo guitar music, steeped in ragtime and country blues, but this time going after something else too — ‘in a harsh climate… this new one reaches a little further both into the past and the future’.
‘Returns to original composition and the blues… with a freshness and authority that nostalgic retreads cannot deliver… Three songs (Odds Against Tomorrow, The Writhing Jar, Already Old) are multi-tracked, an innovation that, for guitar buffs familiar with Orcutt’s stripped-down vernacular, jumps out of the grooves like a Les Paul sound-on-sound excursion in 1948, or a Jandek blues rave-up in 1987. Specifically evoking John Lee Hooker’s double-track experiments on 1952’s Walking the Boogie, the steady chord vamps of Odds Against Tomorrow and Already Old form a harmonic turf on which Orcutt solos with lyrical abandon. The Writhing Jar’s crashing overdubs recall the brassy six-string voicings of This Heat or Illitch. With the exception of the unreconstructed Elmore James-isms of Stray Dog’ and the Layla-finale-like haze of All Your Buried Corpses Begin To Speak, the remaining non-overdubbed tracks dovetail snugly with Orcutt’s previous solo output, reeling gently in a Mazzacane-oid mode or vibing up the standards (Moon River)... Odds Against Tomorrow challenges contemporary solo guitar practice in a way that simultaneously nullifies hazy dreams of folk purity and establishes a new high-water mark for blues-rock reconstruction” (Tom Carter).
Jazz-folk originally issued in 1977 by the BRBQ label out of Bloomington, Indiana; reissued here with extras by Numero.
Pals being Micah Blue Smaldone, Glenn Jones, Michael Gangloff and Nathan Bowles (both of the Black Twig Pickers), and Harmonica Dan. The great ‘Jack Rose’ was hitherto hard-to-get.
Lowdown lap steel and Telecaster collaborations with D. Charles Speer and The Helix, inspired by Link Wray,
Twenty-one songs, running right back to 1971: assured, lovely, intelligent, good-humoured singer-songwriting, mixing up Americana, folk, pop, art rock, and gentle experimentalism.
Originally released in 2007 this redux edition includes new masters from a recently found pristine tape reel and was remastered by Timothy Stollenwerk at Stereophonic Mastering in Portland, OR. Revised artwork; extensive liner notes by Arthur’s partner Tom Lee.
Soulful American folk: a gorgeous, heart-stopping mixture of the longing you get in saudade — singers like Cesaria Evora and Joao Gilberto — and political protest. Will Oldham’s in there; so is Dionne Warwick.