Beneath Confederate Lake lie the songs that have fallen away over Pinetop Seven's nearly 10-year history, either discarded, forgotten, or saved for the right moment. For this rarities release-- a companion to last year's lushly orchestrated comeback, The Night's Bloom-- the band troll for a handful of tracks, and the results are surprising. Instead of a jumble of waterlogged debris, Beneath Confederate Lake sounds like a proper album, its songs preserved by the deep, dark waters. Most come from the five years of intermittent sessions that produced The Night's Bloom; they are interspersed with old songs newly recorded, a track by Darren Richard's side-project Grand Isle, and two contributions to the soundtrack of the obscure indie flick Numinmata: When Body Hunts Mind.
As that filmic source suggests, a large portion of Beneath Confederate Lake is instrumental, echoing Richard's interest in soundtrack work. Short interstitials like "Lewis & Clark, Pt. 1" and "Pt. 2" as well as lengthier songs like the opener "High on a Summer's Tree" and the tango "Fadograph of a Yestern Scene" conjure a darkly curious atmosphere with a percussive sound that recalls Pinetop Seven's self-titled debut. While the mood and melodies are strong enough to make these songs stand on their own, they also provide a backdrop for the tracks that feature vocals and Richard's literary lyrics. "The Western Ash", "Two Dead Men in a Vermont Graveyard", and the alternate take of "Hurry Home Dark Cloud", which are all from the Night's Bloom sessions, develop the musical and conceptual themes the band introduced on that album. They make full use of the larger lineup to create a lush, textured sound over which Richard's inimitable vocals shimmer like an aurora borealis.
The cover of Tom T. Hall's "The Promise and the Dream" proves the album's only misstep, despite the opportunity it grants the band to expand into overt C&W territory. Richard gets points for updating a post-Vietnam ballad and making it explicitly topical, but Hall's straightforward lyrics, which suited him just fine, sound too plainspoken for Richard's otherworldly voice when divorced of narrative context. He just can't sell a line like "The dream was for the huddled masses yearning to breathe free."
Still, this song and the similarly timely-- and more successful-- title track instructively point out the complexity of Richard's songwriting. He sets his story-songs in a hazy American past that incorporates colonial figures, Old West and Native American imagery, and dustbowl details, which are echoed in the technical complexity and antiquated instrumentation of the music. And yet, no matter how historically rooted the music, Richard's concerns remain current. He's engaging the past to address the present, and by relaxing thematic control over the selection and sequencing of these songs, he may have come up with his most relevant album to date.
