The freak-folk universe has two major poles. One is represented by the Jewelled Antler collective, the San Francisco wing of the operation. The other surrounds Vermont's Matthew Valentine, who rose to a kind of prominence as Tower Recordings, and more recently plays as MV & EE with his partner Erika Elder.
Of course, there is plenty more to this freewheeling, loosely defined scene. And, at his best, Valentine embodies everything that marked freak folk as a promising path for American musicians looking to place a woodsy focus on acoustic sounds, whether Western banjos or Eastern tablas. The new record breaks rank. Drone Trailer arrives-- after numerous CD-Rs and tapes of cross-cultural, relentlessly unconventional music to stargaze by-- bearing principally unthreatening, old-fashioned rock'n'roll.
A curveball of cosmic proportions, "Anyway" opens the record, muscling through with fuzzy, hard-rock riffs. The cataract of distortion overpowers Erika Elder's singing, leaving audible only the enigmatic question, "Hey spaceman, hey spaceman/ Whatever happened to the master plan?" Valentine repeats, "Anyway I can" from across the room, a gentle faraway presence that sounds spectral and disembodied.
Turning around completely, "The Hungry Stones" finds Valentine channeling Neil Young circa Sugar Mountain. A surprising juxtaposition of close-up harmonica and distant distortions amplifies the melancholic singing and nostalgic-stoner lyrics. The sleepy vocals and daydream guitars on the 10-minute "Weatherhead Hollow" and "Huna Cosm" verge on slowcore, a sort of bucolic Low. The title track suggests a Deep South-meets-the-Subcontinent fantasia, in the soupy swirling together of Doc Dunn's curving pedal steel, Valentine's bantar, and Elder's anesthetized, steel-magnolia delivery. A fitting summation of a batshit philosophy that, on Drone Trailer, goes down easier as straight-ahead rock.
