Review Summary: The soundtrack to your winter depression
In September, the day shrinks with the withering flowers, and the longer nights begin to turn summer’s plans into memories and these memories into thoughts of all the unrealized potential the season had held in its young hands that once more and too soon turned old, trembling, feeble. Autumn is a season for reflection, and Bob Driftwood’s Crow’s Pine haunting mix of americana and avant-garde experimental music is the soundtrack to the anxious melancholia that accompanies the falling of the leaves, which draws one inwards to meditations on things passing and missed opportunities.
The album is like a troubled journey into landscapes of human misery and hope against the background of a cold and inhospitable winter. Still, despite its haunting beauty, the troubled setting of Crow’s Pine gets a little too troubled for its own good at times, especially during the invasive episodes of nervous noise experiments that disrupt the introspective soundscapes Driftwood carefully assembles on the album’s stronger tracks. Luckily, these minor flaws are not important enough to prevent this album becoming a unique and worthwhile contribution to ambient folk music.
Bob Driftwood is a Vermont based musician and carpenter, part of the folk band
Old Saw, and his drone-heavy americana music is heavily influenced by the sounds of Vermont’s forests and mountains. In an interview with Fifteen Questions, Driftwood tells of his daily ritual, which involves hiking through the woods after work in the evenings, swimming in the local creeks, and resting in meditation 'watching the trees moving or the water turning.' It is not hard to imagine Driftwood amidst a dark pine forest, tuning his banjo to sings songs of lament for all that is lost in the cold season of winter, which is indeed when Driftwood wrote most of the songs for Crow’s Pine.
There is an honest and authentic quality to the record, which is intensified by Driftwood’s commitment to imperfection. In the same interview, he indicates that mistakes he makes while practicing the songs are often deliberately worked into them. This explains some of the hooky and discomforting banjo riffs that rattle along the album like strange creatures through a forest at dusk.
The album’s opening track, “Automatic Masochist,” begins with nothing but the tinkling sound of wind chimes and a sotfly sighing drone, as if the record hesitates for a moment to enter the gloom of the realm it is about to explore. Then a hesitant acoustic guitar starts boom-chucking a single chord that is repeated throughout the entire folk song, and soon Driftwood starts drawing out long notes in his idiosyncratic nasal voice, that cuts like a circle saw through the ambient instrumentation in the background. Driftwood sounds like a cabin-fevered and emaciated John McCauley of
Deer Tick - in the best way possible. The track repeats and repeats until it slowly stops like nightfall over Vermont’s forests, and it sets the tone for the rest of the record, of which most songs have a similar repetitive structure.
Driftwood’s soundscapes are mostly reminiscent of bleak winter landscapes, while there are some tracks on which a silver lining of an impending sun rise becomes audible. The blues tracks on Crow’s Pine are all relentless in their misery. 'O God, I want to go back home,' Driftwood sings on “Concrete Dreams,” as a banjo begins a hasty arpeggio, 'back to the place where I belong / but I do not know where that may be / a hard truth for troubled souls like me.' Violins and a saxophone underlie Driftwood’s heart-felt laments, and they form an experimental and varying counterpart to this repetitive blues. A similar droning blues is sung on “Another Blue,” and title track “Crow’s Pine”.
Just when the doom of these tracks is about to crush the listener, “Ivory Tower” gives her a breather, with its beautiful and melancholic weaving of violins, a lapsteel guitar, and a banjo, that crack open the frozen ground and lead one to an almost Shire-like idyll. It is the center piece of the album, and it left me dewy-eyed after hearing it for the first time, with the perfect harmony of the different partitions that prove that Driftwood is in perfect control over his songwriting. If you should give one song a listen, this would be it.
The album contains two tracks that could well-willingly be described as ‘avant-garde,’ and less well-willingly as the noise a group of sugar-rushed toddlers would make when unleashed in an unattended music room. On the short track “Bunker’s Blues,” Bob goes full on Captain Beefheart. In swelling and then abiding waves of sound, the noise of frantically and arithmetically plucked banjo strings is interspersed with a dissonantly doodling saxophone, while Driftwood delivers his lyrics about poisoned wells and radio static in yet another round of nasally sung long drawn-out notes. It wrecks my nerves instantly. The same happens on “Rat Race”, and both tracks seem to me to be distractions to the pensive mood that Driftwood spins out on the other songs.
Admittedly, however, I am not an avant-garde guy, and there might be a reason for these uncomfortable elements on the album. In the earlier mentioned interview, Driftwood states that he is tired of the ‘overproduced, focus group tested music’, the commerce of which betrays the working-class roots of earlier country in his opinion. “Crow’s Pine”’s imperfection and discomfort are ways to counterbalance those inauthentic tendencies, to embrace and integrate music in the imperfections of life itself.
I think these two experimental tracks should be seen against the light of these aims, and I admire the project of rethinking what music should do today. Still, when it comes to the integrity of the album, I cannot help but feel that it would have been a stronger whole without these two wild deviations from the tone set by the rest of the tracks.
I’ll be listening to this one throughout the autumn and winter, when the soil freezes hard and the trees are bare. Driftwood is a unique voice in the current music scene, one that does not shun the darkness in our hearts and in that of the woods alike, and what keeps this record interesting is that despite its gloom and harshness it never completely blocks out the hope for better days. Both on “Ivory Tower” and on the final track “Spring Lullaby,” it shows us glimmers of what beauty and joy the seed might once again grow into, even though it now lies waiting in the cold, cold ground. It is both a record of misery and hope alike.
