Beat Circus
(Cuneiform)
Skewed traditionalist Brian Carpenter's third album under the Beat Circus name draws its inspiration from both past and future. Its righteous backbone - one-two bass, rackety clattering drums, gospel harmonies, oompah brass bands and the swell and squeal of fiddle - hails from the backwoods hymns and hoedowns of his agrarian childhood. The jittery modernity comes from Carpenter's close ties to Boston's multi-instrumented underground - and to his anxiety over a son diagnosed with autism during the recording period.
Boy From Black Mountain works best as a mad dash through old-time stage sets, Carpenter's uneasy narrator chased by pizzicato angst and "Flight of the Bumblebee"-speed fiddle riffs as he hangs onto his stove-pipe hat. "Petrified Man," with its mad-cap banjo and urgent blasts of harmonica, is a sepia-toned rampage, turned abruptly post-modern with an abstract interval of trombone countpoints. "The Quick and the Dead" starts with a vertiginous late-classical swoop of strings - Paran Amirinazari on violin and Jordan Voelker on viola - before speeding to a rockabilly gallop. Carpenter's sings in a bitter-edged baritone, at times veering perilously towards Crash Test Dummies territory, but at others infusing enough growl and bite to upend the comparison. String band overloads and mordant folk ballads are interspersed with brief instrumental interludes ("The Course of the River", "The Sound and the Fury"), where the classical influence shines through most clearly. Towards the end, "Nantahala" successfully splices the crash and fury of rock guitars to complex, multi-parted stringed arrangements, part prog, part jazz, part country but mostly its own entity.
The album creates a world of its own within the boundaries of these 13 tracks, a jumped up version of a mythical American past that never was but should have been.
Standout Tracks: "Petrified Man," "Nantahala" JENNIFER KELLY
