If it's the aim of folk music to favor the song over the singer, Liam the Younger-- né Liam Betson, occasional guitarist with Jersey caterwaulers Titus Andronicus-- is making folk music. After the Graveyard and Clear Skies Over Black River-- two early home-recorded, self-distributed works from Betson-- find him singing in an unadorned voice over steady, sustaining strums, shooting for relatable, plainspoken truth with every word. One doesn't always get the strongest sense of Betson the person through his tales of strip malls and cemeteries, close friends and faroff train whistles; at times, it seems his adornment-averse songs of permanence, of comings and goings, and of not wasting what little time you've got on earth are singing through him, rather than the other way around.
A few minutes longer and several shades ricketier, After the Graveyard begins with a whorl of ambient noise before Betson starts in with the strumming. Instrumentally, he largely adopts the ardent chug of Woody Guthrie, often opting to leave it at that; the resolute simplicity of this musical backdrop puts the focus squarely on his words, many of which he delivers in an intentionally guileless Guthrie-style ramble. Here, as on Clear Skies, Betson's channeling everyone from Libba Cotten to Conor Oberst, but indie rock's typical anxiety of influence doesn't really factor in here; these songs mean to be part of a tradition that goes well beyond Woody, and Betson does a fine job staying mindful of the past while placing his anxieties squarely in the present. "Ode to Then" contrasts "the strip malls [and] the city halls" with an "old dusty road, riding trains, Old Tom Joad," later noting that "one day the internet will be our version of the wild west." Fundamentally an optimist, Betson seems to be suggesting, in his so-called "songs of my home and songs of my friends," that things aren't really all that different now from the way they've ever been; we could just stand to find a few new ways of looking at them.
Clear Skies Over Black River builds on the successes of Graveyard, with a cleaner sound and a more surefooted approach. Dialing back on the doubling-up Betson gave to many of the guitar-and-vocal lines on Graveyard, Clear Skies is played with a stark intimacy, often just Betson, his guitar, and echoes off the wall of his bedrooms. He's still hanging around tombstones, still singing about the place where the past meets the present, and still in an everyman's voice that suggests a serious lack of ego. But the stark, striking Clear Skies finds him developing a voice that speaks to a very particular kind of existential angst, that feeling where you know things should be better than they are but can't quite articulate why. On the haunting, Microphones-like highlight "Cooking" he asks, "how can I live my life if I can't cook my own food?" Sounding positively devastated by the prospect of never quite mastering Easy Mac, Betson's articulating his need for community, for support; later in the same song, he talks of changing around pronouns so there's no he, no she, just I. That old we-are-one, "Kumbaya" feeling? It's not quite that, but it's awfully close.
Betson reportedly kept Graveyard and Clear Skies mostly to himself before finally letting a few copies into the hands of friends. Listening to either, it's understandable; though not "deeply personal" in the typical bedroom-bloodlet fashion, these are rather revealing records, forefronting Betson's often tentative singing voice and his learn-by-doing approach to the 4-track. But these, at their heart, are songs for sharing; they may be laid down simply, but they're not demos, and there's a gathering strength in their stark presentations. Much like his once-and-former bandmate Patrick Stickles, Betson sometimes hits the wrong note to strike the right feeling; not always the easiest listening, perhaps, but never less than honest.
