The playlist – Americana: Bon Iver, DD Dumbo and Sturgill Simpson

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/jul/24/bon-iver-dd-dumbo-sturgill-simpson-playlist-americana

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Sturgill Simpson – The Promise

Earlier this year Kentucky-born, Nashville-dwelling Sturgill Simpson released his second album, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music. It’s a wonderful record – soulful, witty, sultry, and shot through with the outlaw country feel of Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard without ever falling into pastiche. The Promise is one of its gems. Originally recorded in 1988, a new wave hit for When in Rome, here Simpson magics it into something lost and lonely and long-distance. He starts off singing into his collar, tender and tempered, gently gathering force until that devastating quake to his voice is suddenly strewn into some wild near-howl. You can make as much as you please out of Simpson’s history: the Appalachian coal-mining family, the stint in the navy, the ship-yard work, the boozing, the drugs, the policeman father, the metaphysics and cosmology, but after all the romance of it boils down you’re left with the songwriting and the voice of a master storyteller.

The Barr Brothers – Half Crazy

Approximately a million years ago, in Jackpot Records in Portland, Oregon, I bought a very fine album by Brad Barr called The Fall Apartment – largely on the basis of its acoustic cover of Heart Shaped Box and Barr’s work with The Slip. Every once in a while I would wonder what happened to Barr, and last week I was happy to discover he is now one quarter of The Barr Brothers, a Montreal four-piece that also includes his brother Andrew, Sarah Page and Andres Vial. This track, Brad Barr describes as being “the tenacious offspring of the North African desert music of Mali/Morocco and the sweat and electricity of Chicago and the Mississippi Delta Blues.” It’s certainly a pleasingly slippery piece of music – with one ear it seems a slinking, glimmering thing, but there’s a thump and a thunder to it too.

DD Dumbo

The term Americana is a fuzzy, sprawling thing, but today I’m going to use it to envelop Australian guitarist Oliver Perry, who records as DD Dumbo, and recently played a handful of small shows in the UK after signing to 4AD. As with the Barr Brothers track above, and indeed his label-mate Tuneyards, categorisation is futile – Perry has described his playing as being as influenced by the “African desert blues, Tanzanian ilimba and transcendental Tuvan melody” as the American south, but somewhere in the hovering loops, 12-string distortions, intriguing drum patterns and that rough-edged, reverb-heavy voice there hangs a new kind of blues. One of their performances, recorded by NPR at this year’s SXSW festival, gives a fine taste of the recordings to come.

Jacobean Ruff

A few weeks back I happened to be at a Joni Mitchell tribute evening as part of Garforth arts festival in Yorkshire, the highlight of which was this young Leeds band’s quite devastating reimagining of The Wolf That Lives in Lindsey. Much of the power sits somewhere between the playing of multi-instrumentalist Aaron Collins and the voice of lead singer Sophie Pearson, which, much like Laura Marling’s, is capable of swinging from sharp prettiness to a drowsy, glowering lip-curl. These tracks are from an EP they released earlier this year, though on the basis of their Garforth performance I suspect there is much more fire to come.

Bon Iver – Heavenly Father

This Bon Iver song was released a whisker after our last Americana playlist was published, but as I've listened to it repeatedly ever since, I thought we should still find room to celebrate it here. One of the things I love about Justin Vernon's music is its sense of forward motion, its desire to break new ground. Here, on a track written for the new Zach Braff film, he's singing over a scumbled marching loop – it's a million miles from the plaid-clad cabin folk of reputation, yet there's still a sense of isolation and devastation to it. As ever, the lyrics here are more imagist than explicit, but in their reaching out towards expression, as well as the drive of the music, there is a feeling of onwards and upwards movement – "repaving", to borrow a phrase from one of Vernon's other projects, Volcano Choir.