Review
This Ann Arbor quintet succeeded (thanks to friends/fans/contributors) in their Kickstarter campaign last December – and now the album gets a proper release show – April 18th at Woodruff’s in Ypsilanti (w/Honey Locust and Steve Smalls)
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From the first scrape of the of the washboard, Baby to Beast is such a rich, robust listening experience, it feels unavoidably cinematic.
The listener is displaced in this dreamily disorienting way to some far off, timeless land where our quirky, curious characters are swinging, shuffling, and waltzing their way, with eerie beauty, blasting out the mind-numbing memes and hipster catalogers, their banjos breaking computers and those swinging strings defying Stratocasters, this Ann Arbor quintet displays a preternatural sense (and, in fact, something like a preservationists’ bent) toward the harrowing of harmonies and the visceral impact of intertwining melodies from warm acoustic resonance. You almost get dust in your eyes – the blends of swing, bluegrass, Dixieland ditties and alluring gypsy-folk whirls – is something close to a transcendent listen…you’re there, on some dirtroad, being led on by these songs…
Yes, it feels old-timey, the shushy strum of the mandolin, that glistening tinny-yelp of banjo, the honky-tonk charm curling those cooing, crooning balladeer’s honeyed harmonies. Yes, you almost wanna grab an empty jug o’ moonshine and add your own breathy blares. But there’s something edgier to Beast, something further outfield, that gives it its distinctive glow – it could be how earnestly it embraces the beauty of the folk song tradition and meticulously stirs in foggier, headier sonic concoctions of a more psychedelic flare, it could be their trips into spookier realms of goosebump-pricking tall tale sways, or it could be just how damned harmonious the whole affair winds up being – like these voices, chimes, strums and percussive scrapes belong together – grown together into a five headed beast…
And then, by the last song… “changing into something new.”
Listen to Baby to the Beast:
