Emmett Kelly's the deliberate type, not usually one to rush things. It took Kelly's Cairo Gang some seven years to follow their fine 2006 debut with a proper full-length, last year's spare, solemn The Corner Man. In the meantime, Kelly's kept Cairo fans in one-offs and curios, but he's mostly been busy carving out the space around Will Oldham's immortal voice on a pair of stellar, characteristically stark Bonnie "Prince" Billy records. Kelly's exacting nature comes through in much of his recent work: he rarely uses two notes when one will do.
Tiny Rebels, the Cairo Gang's new six-song mini-LP, finds Kelly throwing much of that caution to the wind. Rebels came together in a fit of inspiration: recorded in a week, with both the same musicians and the same instruments on every track, the reverb-thick, unabashedly Byrdsy Rebels is driven by a spontaneous streak even Kelly seems a little surprised he had in him. Not that Rebels is some slapdash affair; Kelly and company committed every sound on Rebels to quarter-inch tape, and the placement of each chiming guitar and analog crackle feels purposeful. Vocals come in twos and threes, a mist of echo hangs over just about everything; parts of Rebels sound beamed in directly from 1966, just as psychedelia started creeping its way toward folk-rock. But, amidst Rebels' taut harmonies and stately chord shuffles-- and despite the backward glance of its sonics-- there's an undeniable urgency at work here, a sense that this stuff all but burst forth from Kelly, fully-formed.
Still, whenever you work this fast, you're always running the risk of letting something slip. Tiny Rebels seems to know exactly how it wants to sound; it's what to say-- and how to say it-- that seems a little less clear. Last year's The Corner Man threw Kelly's voice way out front, offering it nowhere to hide among the barren accompaniment. Kelly sang the words with grave austerity but their plainspoken nature left little question as to what Kelly hoped to get across. On Tiny Rebels, Kelly coats his voice-- and virtually every other surface-- in enough reverb that meaning is often left obscured in a haze of ringing chords and tandem vocals.
And the lyrics peeking through the clouds just feel a bit imprecise, particularly up against the front-and-center Kelly of The Corner Man; it's as though, after putting it all out there not so many months ago, Kelly's a bit reticent to share that much again. Halfway through "Shake Off," when Kelly confesses "I don't fucking feel much" and quickly starts to rail against "all the retarded bullshit I must be able to shake off," it's a shock: for just a fleeting second or two, you can actually make out a real person-- and not just a slice of received wisdom or a paisley-tinted caricature-- in Kelly's vaseline-spackled lens. Tiny Rebels certainly proves the slow-going Kelly and company can make a great-sounding little record in seven days' time. But, with that frustrating distance between Tiny Rebels' finely tuned sonics and Kelly's uncharacteristically indistinct lyrics, it's hard not to wonder what another week might've done.
