If you've listened to top 40 radio in the last few years, it's no secret that the producer is everything: a Brandy single isn't really a Brandy song so much as it's a vehicle for her producer to lay down a great track that happens to feature Brandy. I wouldn't exactly say this ethos has crept into indie rock, but the importance of production is no smaller in the musical minor leagues. Some records work best if they sound like they were recorded in a tin can, but others need the finesse of a skilled recordist to get everything just right.
And Mayday are a band that's better served by finesse than tin cans. Accurately described as a front for the muse of former Lullaby for the Working Class honcho/current Cursive guitar hero Ted Stevens, Mayday released a frankly brilliant debut last year: Old Blood, an expansive, ambitious swirl of Great Plains dust and sonic sophistication that blew expectations out of the water. Part of the record's success was the deft hand lent to the recording by brothers Mike & A.J. Mogis, who together are about as close as you can get to Nigel Godrich in the breadbasket.
The brothers Mogis are unfortunately nowhere to be found on this new Mayday record, their first away from their old home at Saddle Creek records. The band's music is good enough to get them by without a proper treatment at the board, but it's hard to avoid imagining what a better recording could have done to make this album more dramatic and intense. As it stands, the recording is adequate to convey the band's ideas, but it frequently robs the arrangements of their distinctness by mashing the sounds together in the same frequency range and letting distortion gain too much of an upper hand.
Despite a huge cast of players, I Know Your Troubles Been Long is a great deal more basic than its predecessor, a snapshot of rustbelt Americana suffused with impressionistic lyrics that occasionally veer into the political realm, though never in a pointed manner. "Little Tremors" takes an oblique look at the Iraq war with its imagery of a "lonely cowboy" and the verse "There are tremors in the valley/ Little tremors/ Can't you feel them." "Virginia" expands on this a bit, with its loosely woven tale of young lovers fleeing a town that turned on them "in support of a warring regime."
Tentative commentary aside, Stevens trades in haunting verses like this doozy that opens "Crawfish River": "Let's go down to the riverbed/ Let's go and catch some crawfish/ Mom will throw them in the kettle, break their little backs first/ Our little Townes will bite off the heads one by one/ And laughing, he'll spit out each skull piece." The way Stevens takes nostalgic memories like this and turns them into something sinister colors the whole album, and in a sense, the murk of the sound somewhat aids his sailboat-in-a-hurricane worldview.
Stevens is just about buried under the stuttering drums and ruddy guitars of "Running Away", but the song's arrangement builds up an incredible momentum before finally breaking into a sort of tractor-pull hoedown, mud flying right along with the fiddles and slide guitars. "Lost Serenade", on the other hand, is a masterful ballad, graced by lazily interwoven trumpet and violin-- this is music for an empty prairie cabaret at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday. The album is bookended by the beautiful garbage of "Lone Star" and "Laundromat", songs whose arrangements are so thoroughly broken they cohere into ramshackle beauty.
It's a bit of a shame that Mayday don't quite live up to their towering start here, but the resulting album is still full of moments of bleary-eyed beauty and graceful wreckage, and it's hard to ignore a band who does that so well. If you like you albums with the crusts cut off, I'm afraid this one probably isn't for you, but nearly anyone who's ever found something to enjoy in cheap microphones and overdriven VU meters will find something to love here.
