William Elliott Whitmore is an old-fashioned sort: He's just 33, but his deep, gnarled vocals suggest a particularly well-trod life. A Lee County, Iowa native, Whitmore plays scrappy, acoustic folksongs on banjo (occasionally augmented by a bass drum), singing earnestly about things like hammers, steamboats, and dying. It's embarrassingly easy to picture him attacking logs with an old, rusted ax, or sitting by a campfire chewing on a stick of black licorice. There's a dignity to his work, which is unfussy and ambivalent to trends; sometimes that simplicity can feel admonishing. Whether he intends it to or not, something in his voice seems to say: "Stop Tweeting. It's stupid."
Field Songs is Whitmore's seventh full length (not counting a collection of demos in 1999), and stylistically, it's right in step with his previous albums. Whitmore still works on his family's farm in southeastern Iowa, in a fertile little crescent between the Mississippi and Des Moines rivers; his official bio includes the line, "I was out chopping wood and my uncle said I had a call from a record company." (Authenticity alert!) He came up in the hardcore scene, sharing the stage with bands like Murder By Death and Converge, serenading crowds of agitated kids with tattoos and shaved heads, and proving that folk music could feel just as revolutionary, just as strong. On his last record, 2009's Animals in the Dark, he became a protest singer, skewering conservative policy and encouraging thoughtful mutiny.
Work is a persistent theme on Field Songs. Samples of chirping critters pop up frequently (Whitmore and his family raise wild birds), and his lyrics tend to be focused on tactile, useful things: "We're gonna do some work, spend a day digging in the dirt," he bellows on the record's title track, his voice suddenly big, bombastic. Plenty of these songs position labor as a kind of salvation, a way to insulate yourself from the modern world; for Whitmore, work itself is a threatened institution. "Three square meals and a living wage, reminds me of the good old days/ Before the manifest destiny of the factory farms, before those cutthroats came and burned down the barns," he sings. It may sound like an awful lot of posturing, but Whitmore sells it; miraculously, nothing at all here reeks of bullshit. "Here I am, working in the field/ If the heat don't getcha, then the sunburn will," he promises, with all the confidence of a man who knows such things.
Although Whitmore is a talented banjoist, his voice is very much the focus. Weary and full of crags (from a lifetime of smoking, maybe, or hollering at hardcore shows), it's impressively wide and strong, imbuing his compositions with a kind of welcome toughness. Folk music has a reputation for limpness, but Whitmore's vocals are energizing-- they give these tracks backbone. And while a few pieces are undeniable standouts ("Everything Gets Gone", "Let's Do Something Impossible"), Field Songs really plays best as a single document: a soundtrack to a day in the field, a day anyone stuck behind a keyboard has probably yearned for once or twice.
