If you've ever been in a guitar shop, you know that most of them have warmly lit, wood-paneled rooms off to the side, separated from the din of the rest of the store by a glass door. These rooms are full of acoustic guitar, banjos, mandolins, twelve-strings, and maybe an acoustic bass or two. These rooms are sanctuaries from the kid mangling "Manic Depression" on the budget Strat or the guy who thinks he's a slap-bass wizard. Instead, you have some old dude with a beard ripping through an incredible etude like it's no big thing.
I imagine that Jim & Jennie's place looks and feels something like those rooms, bearded older guy included. If the photos in the liners to Rivers Roll on By, their fourth album, are any indication, they might actually live in a tin-roofed log cabin. Their home, the Pennsylvania countryside-- with its softened Appalachian ridges and innumerable valleys-- seems like a perfect place for music like this, a remarkably pure take on bluegrass, with only the sparest of modern twists.
Traditional songs and covers of bluegrass classics are included, but the band's originals, penned by Jim Krewson and Jennie Benford, show they've also done their homework. On the faster numbers, Krewson's twangy, nasal delivery is a dead ringer for an old bluegrass picker like Roscoe Holcomb, and his voice blends nicely in close harmony with Benford's, a mezzo soprano that sounds like a mountain sunrise. The two are abetted by an able cast of fiddlers, pluckers, and pickers who give an authentic ring to old chestnuts like "Country Boy Rock & Roll". About the only thing here that wouldn't have fit on a Bill Monroe or Carter Family record is the occasional tasteful flourish of electric guitar, like the beautiful slide part on Benford's "the Poison Vine", a masterful original that could just as easily be a 150-year-old song your grandmother sang in the kitchen when you were little.
Jim and Jennie split their time between stark ballads and rollicking, banjo-fueled stompers, both played with aplomb, and there's rarely a misstep. When there is, it's usually subtle-- for instance, the lyrics to "Mt. St. Helens" feel like they ought to be metaphorical, but they instead are literally about living on Mt. St. Helens, a topic that feels more random than apropos. It's a pretty small concern, though, and this is about as fantastic and authentic a bluegrass album as you could hope for from a group of young modern musicians.
