"Well, you wonder why I always dress in black." "I wear black on the outside, 'cause black is how I feel on the inside." Six of one, half dozen of the other, right? And yet, what do we have to show for the past three decades of trying to find common ground between the barroom and the bedsit? Ryan Adams' Love Is Hell? Pernice Brothers? Hell, don't sleep on a couple joints from the first Pete Yorn album. But is that gonna cut it? Whether you think it's more promising from an artistic or a commercial standpoint, Night Beds' Country Sleep shows you just how wide open this lane really is. Upon first listen, you're struck with the thought of "Wow, this could be really popular." Because for a lot of people, nothing cuts through the noise like a 23-year old singer-songwriter who wants to tell you over either acoustic guitars or weepy, reverbed ones how he drank, loved and lost beyond his years. Winston Yellen, essentially the creative body of Night Beds, does both. And in a lot of ways, Country Sleep delivers while still making you feel like it's playing on your vulnerability, the Pavlovian response to this stuff: It wants you to feel your own pain as much as it allows you to feel Yellen's.
That said, Yellen is kind of the real deal. His past couple of years have been itinerant, dropping out college, having been relieved of both jobs and girlfriends, traveling across the country and eventually writing Country Sleep in a Nashville house once owned by none other than Johnny Cash himself. Dude had to take out some loans to get it done, but I swear, labels should be giving out scholarships for this sort of thing if you've got a voice like Yellen's. The guy is blessed with jump-out-of-the-gym vocal athleticism and throughout Country Sleep, it's unclear whether he's a showoff or if he's still trying to figure out how to corral it. Though there’s a fair share of C&W formalism and cask-aged drawl, Yellen's more of a Buckley or even a Banhart in terms of his ability to work without strcuture. A diva, in other words. That much is clear from a cappella opener "Faithful Heights", which ascends from a maudlin moan to a holler by its end. On the opposite side, there's "Even If We Try", audio lemon meringue that's little more than a couple of fluffy chords and Yellen's tart falsetto in waltz time before shifting to a fiddle-led reverie.
It's all very disarming and Country Sleep talks a good game and looks the part like the beautiful, new stranger in town. And it all comes down to whether or not you want to ask it the tough questions. "Ramona" is an instantly ingratiating piece of twang-free alt-country, rollicking acoustic strums, gliding lead riffs on guitar rather than pedal steel and a good ol' "fuck" thrown in to seal the alt- deal. But as you listen to him describe this girl, stunted by religion and a vague social anxiety, flawed in all the right ways and salvageable through Yellen, you start to get Manti Te'o on the brain and wonder, has he actually met someone like Ramona? Or is she just a construct that makes for a narrative that's easy to grasp? In fact, is the guy singing this song real? I dunno, but judging from that billowy coda, she sure is pretty.
So yeah, even if it's steeped in genres whose appeal often rests on the authenticity of one's sadness, it's beautiful enough for you to feel guilty about refusing to totally suspend your disbelief. The guy might strive to present himself as a Heartbreaker, but he's much better playing the softie. While "Lost Springs" and "Was I For You?" are certainly breakup balm, it's the over-the-counter stuff. He repeats "I don't wanna feel this," towards the end of the former, though my guess is that you actually do want to feel this. It's a kind of lovesickness that feels manageable, even somewhat attractive. And hell, you're probably already inspired to make your next crush playlist, which will include tracks from Country Sleep. A propulsive, be-quiet-and-drive song at its core, the hushed "22" drops the top to let in the sound of crickets and sparkling strings. Likewise, after an untethered falsetto introduces "Wanted You In August", everything stops for Yellen to intone "I want you" and the stars go blue, evoking the humidity and romantic allure of southern, summer nights-- the double meaning of the word "pine" practically invented Yellen's lyrical style.
But while he plays the part of a guy born into an abundance of inherited sadness, how much of it is his own? It's a question that keeps arising from a musical and a lyrical standpoint. Point blank, if you locked Ryan Adams in a room for an hour with an acoustic guitar and demanded he write five songs, one of them would probably be 97% like "Cherry Blossoms". The five-minute closer "TENN" suggests it's the most autobiographical song on Country Sleep, but it's one where you need to retrofit his bio so that its epigram-- "sorrow stole my youth/ what's left I'll give to you"-- hits the way it should. For the time being, Yellen nails letting the sound and emotional tenor of Country Sleep give us the gist: we were supposed to rise above, but we sink into the ocean, he's waiting to derail, he loves the feeling when he goes out, dancing with the women at the bar. Yellen might not have too much to say about his Nashville city nights that we haven't heard before, but Country Sleep works as a personal work about the shared experience of…how'd that song go? You were young and man, you were sad.
