What do candy, lipstick, and country music have in common? When the job market's as dry as an Arizona ditch in August and flour canisters start subbing for IRA accounts, consumption historically trends towards confections, cosmetics, and calamity narratives. I'll let economists and Adbusters types unpack the first two, but the last needs no explaining: Even without 20-foot high billboard titles like "All the Money I Had Is Gone" and "The Sun Never Shines", banjos, fiddles, and twangy vocals just plain old holler HARD TIMES. More important, country music's accoutrements signal the inclusive, populist sentiment that we're all in this mess together-- even when the actions of hedge fund managers and insurance company executives say otherwise. Put it this way: When the Coen brothers wanted to gently mock earnest Depression-era social realism while also acknowledging that capitalism indeed co-opts everything in its path, including music and misery, they used "old-timey" "Man of Constant Sorrow" as shorthand.
I doubt it's an intentional act of class warfare, but with the release of their third full-length album, Winter Hours, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, alt-country band Deep Dark Woods could hit cultural paydirt. As Winter Hours' warm and fully fleshed string arrangements, quaint subjects and syntax, and willingness to let its bluegrass hang out (particularly on "Nancy" and "As I Roved Out") imply, the quartet isn't especially shy of the "country" part of that taxonomy or, despite coming from rock backgrounds, anxious to prove their "alt" credentials. And harmony-heavy, traditional-sounding folk is having its moment. Venn diagram the record collections of Deep Dark Woods and Pitchfork's 2008 album list topper Fleet Foxes and you'd round up a sizeable stack of Neil Young, Gram Parsons, and the Band LPs. But while Fleet Foxes have taken their influences and crafted them into pretty, abstract musical excursions and ahistorical hymns to nature, Deep Dark Woods work the material, storytelling aspects of the tradition. Winter Hours abounds with ballads about small mistakes swollen large, petty misunderstandings never mended, poverty, heartbreak, death, and a whole lot of wandering in the wilderness. (The album's only public-domain standard, "When First Into This Country", pretty much nails all of those in one whack.)
"All the Money I Had Is Gone" is the album's standout, a gentle highway-strip-tracing pedal steel and banjo number in which a self-described "wayward son" calls out "All the greedy hands/ That live around this land" and also admits his part in his penurious position. Strike any chords? Singer and primary songwriter Ryan Boldt's steady tone is mournful but not maudlin, as he recounts disasters in "The Gallows", "Two Time Loser", and "Farewell", the album's counter-intuitively titled lead track about marriage and murder. Despite some Pinetop Seven-recalling gothic textures ("The Birds on the Bridge", written by bassist Chris Mason, is a sinister paean to paranoia) and jam-banding noodles ("The Sun Never Shines"), Deep Dark Woods-- particularly Boldt-- keep emotions tightly wrapped, opaque. This is both to the album's advantage and detriment. Storytelling needs a narrator, preferably a reliable, sympathetic one that's easy on the ears, but it also needs a strong voice capable of venting horror, frustration, sadness, anger, outrage. And god knows we've got enough to be outraged about these days.
