Ominously mellow, the Anomoanon's music is a lilting tide in which you don't mind drowning, much less the fact that your family will have to pay their last respects to an expensive box containing a rusted lounge chair. It's nigh impossible to avoid associating this band with Will "Bonnie-Prince-Palace-Push-Songs-Music-Brothers" Oldham: Ned shares plenty of his wily sibling's vocal tics and virtues-- a mumbly Kentucky brogue, a cocky but worried tone, a subdued wail-- and Will usually guests on Ned's recordings (The Anomoanon have conversely acted as Will's backing and touring band, sharing peripheral personnel in Dave Heumann, Pooh Johnston, and Paul Oldham). Both acts cover obscurish poetry, and are puckish with syntax and grammar. Lyrically, they love to tiptoe in tulips alternately soothing and disturbing.
But Asleep Many Years In The Wood continues to define Ned's own dominion: he is not his brother's stevedore, he's the autopiloting captain of some weird tractor-boat, a hoverharvester that would replace the locals' fear of twisters (if Kentucky had everglades). Whereas Will has anachronistic magnetism and an under-the-bridge creepiness, Ned cuts a traditionally attractive and welcoming figure; he is Abel to his brother's Cain, or Arnold Schwarzenegger to Will's Danny DeVito.
Another Anomo-myth is that "they sound like the Grateful Dead." Leave that noise to the misguided folks with dancing-bear ankle-tats, the ones who say "whoa, that's Jerry, brah" whenever the professor shows a slide of Karl Marx or Michelangelo's God (or Papa Smurf). Ned's otherworldly wharf-folk does not "jam," nor does it indulge in that subset of psychedelia's time-honored (and time-consuming) bottom-scrapery. Disclaimer the Last: while even the most ornate "alt-country" records can suffer from sameyness, anyone who calls the Anomoanon's work conventional is only half-listening.
You have to wonder if the band took the mobile recording unit from Shelbyville's Rove Studios to coastal Onancock, Virginia in order to safeguard the marina-vibe they've cultivated since 1999's Summer Never Ends EP, or just for the place's perverse name, because Ned appears to enjoy simultaneous fulfillment and inversion of expectations. His slow jams always prefer realism to romance; "One That Got Away" (a gaw-geous duet with Will that, though it might be about a dead lover, couldn't resist the cornball fishing-joke title) begins, "Baby/ I don't think about you all the time." The album is packed with uncanny lines: "You gave away all of your eyes," "If I understood everything you're saying, I would be you," or check this out: "Friends like us, we need some enemies."
During the slippery, mystical "Sixteen Ways," the band debuts the newest clan member, baby Sam Oldham, crying, in a gesture much less maudlin than "Sail To The Moon"-- Radiohead's new homage to Lennon's egoey, procreation-praising "Beautiful Boy". Not all the verbiage contained here is keepworthy, though: Ned commits a dopey rhyme crime ("sad guy" and "bad guy") and I hope he's quoting an Alzheimer's-compromised Mr. Belvedere when he sings, "Sometimes dreams make me happy/ Sometimes they give me the worst kind of fright." Derrr, flowers is pretty to smell at. Run quick from scary bears.
The whole project is ruled by "Kick Back", a Fogertized cowbell stomp with a dash of Allmania, tempered by its Dylan-worshiping Jennyanykind neu-boogie. During the breakdown, you hear a cough, then a mutter of "kickin' back," then a bonkers Vietnam-paranoid scream, "KICKIN' BACK!" The moment's incongruity provides a great upsurge, like when Frankie shouted for us to relax, or when Ian demanded we dance (three times) to the radio. Fun is your imperative! Chill the fuck out right now or I'll snap! The song lifts the listener beyond any suspicion that the Anomoanon operates out of a Nepot Depot, beyond the horror of termites choosing your house every swarm-season, beyond your exercise bulimia, and beyond how you had to pull a Schopenhauer and shove your cynical RoboMaid Maria down the stairs for asking if you were listening to the Spin Doctors.
The title track is a full-on cattle-driver. Even the artwork (a liquor bottle boasting the album name; a picture of a rotting pig--"old ham," get it?) is a treat. Thank you, Ned, Jack, Willy, Aram, and Jason; you blokes know when to pepper up an otherwise unsurprising (and creatively extinct) genre with some viola and tubular bells, and your lyrics can make the mockery I receive for flying your muddy flag in this era of laptopclashtronelectrica worthwhile. Just tonight, when I asked Rob Mitchum about that new Console, he said, "But I thought you only listened to music made by melancholy people with big beards." That was cold, city boy. How dare you disparage the militia-standoff optimism of us bindle-carrying, moonshine-jug-brandishing idiots.
