Omaha-bred Alex McManus is the sole force behind this one-man Americana folk band, and for more than half a decade now, he's recorded under the plural moniker The Bruces. He began recording in the 1990s, during brief tenures playing with Vic Chesnutt and Lambchop, but didn't manage to secure a record deal until the Athens-friendly (but Austin-based) Misra label saw fit to issue his spotty 2002 full-length The War of The Bruces. Two years later, he's returned with The Shining Path (presumably named for the Peruvian communist movement, although he makes no mention of it).
McManus possesses a high, piercing voice, slightly off-key and unsettlingly off-kilter. It's precise and gelid in a way that sounds detached, which gives his songs a chilly quality appropriate to the overcast skies and wintry scenes that illustrate his music. And though his is neither a polarizing nor a necessarily unique voice, it seems never to settle down into predictability. Likewise, his music may be quiet, but is rarely ever soft.
Alternately coldly confrontational ("What Do You Know About Home") and warmly friendly ("Sleepwalking"), McManus has intuitively attuned his voice to the dulcimer, banjo, and rattling percussion that color The Shining Path's 10 songs; perhaps it's due to his former experience as a sideman, or to the fact that he plays almost every instrument on the album (there are only four non-Bruces listed in the credits). Sonically, The Shining Path is subtly eclectic, making good use of a few backup singers as well as a chorus of bom-bom-bahs on "Fine Solutions". "Sleepwalking" hinges on a nearly arrhythmic flamenco guitar interlude, and the wind chime of instruments on "Pilot Light" and the acoustic guitars like icicles melting on "Far East Sweet" anchor McManus' airy vocals to the ground.
Despite admitting that "I've got the wrong tongue for such a long sound," McManus' songwriting voice is keenly acclimated to the world around him-- both the natural and the manmade-- and his tensile, barely dissonant vocals lend gloomy gravity to his songs about insects in the bug zapper ("The Electric Halo") and about the detachment of living away from home ("Beautiful Slanted Northern Light"). But even home presents a distinct dreariness: On the intimately domestic "Pilot Light", his furnace goes out, "so I ignite the pilot light on my four-burner stovetop/ Heat my house with the oven door hanging wide open." Similarly, most of the songs evoke loneliness and isolation, in lines like, "And fallen stars they're all shooting something/ Then they turn into snow/ On your TV screen," which unravel a progression of images that descend from the skies and into your room.
About halfway through The Shining Path, however, the songs begin to meander in and out of focus, the album begins to sag and slow, and the spell threatens to break. The nearly vocal-less "My Nerviosa" makes a nice interlude between the halves, but is too structureless to be so long on an album that is itself so short. It doesn't help that the brief "What Do You Know About Home" feels faint and only half-developed.
But this Path does finally lead to the somber title track, on which McManus steels himself against the departure of a lover. As if summoning the last of his resolve, he manages to sound hopeful: "If I had a compass I would turn the world around/ And make the sun arc the sky in your favor." Of course, every silver lining has a dark cloud, and The Shining Path ends with McManus, his voice for once steady and solid, lamenting, "I think I lost your road."
