Sometimes it's hard to believe there even is a rural America anymore. When you spend months at a time without leaving the city and suburbs you get so used to pavement and manicured lots that it starts to look normal, as though there never was any prairie or forest there to begin with. While the sprawl I'm used to is Chicago, Patrick Gubler is similarly incubated from the natural world in New York City, but he's somehow managed to keep in touch with the backwoods and dirt roads that make up the parts of America in which most of us have never resided. Since exiting Tower Recordings to cut albums on his own as P.G. Six, he's crafted a deeply naturalistic sound rooted in the early 70s progressive folk of the British Isles, with room for diversions into abstract expressionist interludes.
The Well of Memory is Gubler's second album as P.G. Six, and it treads similar ground to his debut, opening with a creepy/pretty harp improvisation and dialing up Pentagle, Steeleye Span and Magna Carta from there with a clutch of songs and instrumentals that wouldn't sound out of place in the score for a new cinematic adaptation of MacBeth. Gubler plays a mean Renaissance Faire guitar, and his even, earthy croon helps keep the fog from blowing too far off the moors.
The opening title track is a lengthy harp improvisation that sounds played on an open-tuned instrument, which Gubler plucks and strums, the lower strings ringing with a guttural quality that clouds the sound with overtones. He revisits this approach twice more on the album, which is unfortunately twice too much, as it's easy to lose interest during these meandering passages. He slips free-folk elements like these into a lot of the more conventional songs to better effect, winding down "Come In/The Winter It Is Past" with a prolonged passage of droning buzz, while his hovering electric guitar lights fire to "Crooked Way"'s entrancing acoustic folk.
The most traditional song Gubler offers is "The Old Man on the Mountain", a narrative ballad so simply worded and old-school that I'm surprised Smithsonian Folkways hasn't picked up the publishing rights. Over his fluttering acoustic, he falls asleep by the roadside and dreams of walking up the mountain finding an old man living among the remnants of a past settlement. Closer "The Weeping Willow", with backing vocals from Helen Rush, sounds almost ancient with its spare acoustic guitar and piano arrangement, while "Considering the Lateness of the Hour" is a hill gnome freakout with guitars melting and running like slag over plunking hand drums and shaker.
Unfortunately, the album's scattered peaks aren't enough to overcome a general sense of aimless drift that hangs over the album as a whole-- the songs have a tendency to slip by unnoticed if you start doing even the most minor thing while listening. Fans of P.G. Six's debut, Parlor Tricks & Porch Favorites, should be pleased with this effort, as the two albums are extremely similar, but this is primarily recommended for only the most intrepid fans of the recent free-folk explosion.
