At first it sounds like a wrong note, low and loud and gently discordant near the start of "Butter & Eggs", the opening track on Shana Cleveland’s solo debut. She picks out a quiet acoustic theme shaped roughly like a question mark, then dots it with a bass note that thrums loosely, a rattle that cuts the air and dispels the notion that Oh Man, Cover the Ground will be the kind of tasteful folk record that plays quietly in the background. There’s an entire guitar solo in that one moment, revealing Cleveland to be a deft player and a witty composer. She accentuates certain details with a percussive strike or a sudden strum, and that technique destabilizes "Butter & Eggs", which changes shape and direction on her whim rather than by any sense of melodic momentum.
She’s been honing her chops as a solo artist for a few years now, although most readers may recognize her as one-fourth of the Seattle garage-pop outfit La Luz. The Sandcastles have been around maybe even longer in some form or another, its membership consisting of whoever happens to be onstage or in the studio with Cleveland at any given moment. For Oh Man, Cover the Ground, the band includes nine rotating musicians who add a flourish of clarinet, cello, and Wurlitzer to these songs. The music on "Itching Around" and "SPATM" is somehow both lush and austere, as the Sandcastles gently push against Cleveland’s guitar and her sunset of a voice. Even the keyboard solo on "City to City" sounds like it doesn’t want to get in her way.
Cleveland is a guitarist first and foremost, a vocalist second, and a songwriter third. Her lyrics tend toward a kind of brisk poetry, stark and ominous and generally reluctant to dwell on any one moment or sensation. In just 63 words, "City to City" evokes an immense feeling of transience that any touring musician will recognize ("I began to wonder what our house was for"). Most of these songs, however, are about the simple pleasures of another body. "Sweet Percy Perdue, my nights belong to you," she sings on "Rounding the Block". "The peaks and valleys too, all the creatures that you drew." It’s not what she's singing but the way she’s singing it: her voice straining slightly toward notes just outside her range, drawing out the phrases languidly, savoring the smoothness of those vowels like stones she found on the beach.
This is, however, not a singer-songwriter’s album, but a guitar album—as befits a woman who illustrated a full set of folk trading cards. Cleveland may be routinely compared to other female singer-songwriters, but she may ultimately have more in common with the likes of William Tyler, Daniel Bachman, and James Blackshaw—that boy’s club of American Primitivists. The rolling reel that opens "Holy Rollers" and the almost Celtic fretwork of "Quiet as Skin" suggest an artist who is knowledgeable of the past but not beholden to it. She’s not an ostentatious player, although she certainly has the chops; she seldom solos and usually avoids the fussy filigrees that demonstrate technique as much as they serve the song. There is power in her brand of understatement, in letting a song almost fall apart just to show how sturdy it is.
