There's a paradox that sets the Black Twig Pickers apart from their peers. The acoustic quartet plays songs particular to the region they call home, the mountainous stretch that extends from North Carolina upward into West Virginia and Kentucky. They've learned their tunes by seeking out old-timers and their extant kin, by reading the histories and joining in song circles and all-night jams. Musicians regularly gather in their droves to do exactly that with many of these songs, but the Pickers are a thoroughly modern old-time band.
The Pickers' draw to these antediluvian songs seems simply to be the music itself, rather than its aesthetic. They've repudiated fellow acoustic travelers who dress in period costumes, and they don't pretend to be genre purists, confessing in recent interviews to interests in Lil B and Terry Riley, Junior Kimbrough and the Fall. They backed Jack Rose on the monumental Luck in the Valley, while the group's young banjo player, Nathan Bowles, and their research-driven leader Mike Gangloff, play in Pelt, the brilliant Appalachia acoustic drone ensemble. They are also one of the rare string bands to work with a record label that's associated with indie rock; their relationship with Chicago's forever-interesting Thrill Jockey affords them access to new sets of listeners, but it also confirms their proclivity for breaking from their scene's often-cloistered ranks. Students and teachers, gatherers and conveyors, Black Twig Pickers know that the survival-- and especially vitality-- of this American folk form depends upon pushing it past its regional strongholds.
Rough Carpenters is the latest in an impressive string of Black Twig Pickers full-lengths; it's the swiftest, too, as its 45 minutes feel much shorter thanks to the enthusiasm of the gamboling quartet. Excepting a two-song experiment from late last year, it is also the first to integrate fiddler and dancer Sally Anne Morgan. Appropriately, the band met Morgan at a late-night house party of pickers and listeners in Virginia, later reconnecting with her at a political rally in the mountains of Kentucky. Her contribution is key here, as the Pickers spend almost half of Carpenters working through one instrumental configuration that hinges upon her addition-- fiddles in complementary tunings, accompanied by the quick flick of Bowles' rhythm-inclined banjo and guitarist Isak Howell's heavy and brisk strums. During "Where the Whippoorwills are Whispering Goodnight", for instance, she and Gangloff sing to one another with a fetchingly bittersweet tone, telling the tale of this Charlie Poole favorite without saying a word. During "Charleston Girls", they play with the intoxicated euphoria of two red-faced lovers cycling round and round on the dance floor, all excitable and lusty.
Morgan's second fiddle has added more flexibility to an already-versatile outfit, a characteristic that Rough Carpenters makes remarkably clear: As Gangloff bows the theme of "Little Rose", Bowles bangs across the fiddle's neck with chopsticks, eliciting the rhythmic melodies of a hammered dulcimer on a budget. Howell adds harmonica on "Banks of the Arkansas", lending a bit of depth to a thin song from the wings by countering the lithe melody of the twin fiddles and the steady banjo-guitar trot. It's the sort of smart textural addition you'll barely notice but that you'd certainly miss if it had never been there. The fiddles even take a turn for themselves on "Old Christmas Morning", their strings and bows emitting white-hot streaks of radiant abrasion when Gangloff and Morgan pull against the melody.
This time out, the Pickers-- a group whose vocals have generally functioned better live than on tape-- even connect by voice. Consecutive cuts "Roll on John" and "Jack of Diamonds" feature some of the band's best singing to date: Howell keens high and lonesome during the latter, while Morgan chases his words on the former with casual charm, as if she's the mockingbird teasing the poor man's lament. Howell does get swallowed a bit by the title cut, but the song finds its sparks in the banjo harmonies of Bowles and Gangloff. They put the tinny stereotype to rest at once, weaving a web that sounds somehow lush-- maybe not the first word that comes to mind when one considers the five-string punchline. The Black Twig Pickers, after all, continue to confound expectations for such ancestral acts, even as they expand their erudition within and embrace of the canon itself. Rough Carpenters sounds vibrant and enveloping, an old-time feat for these mercurial times.
