Last year, the tiny North Carolina label Paradise of Bachelors issued Poor Moon-- 13 tracks of skewed, country-soul greatness from Hiss Golden Messenger-- in a vinyl edition of 500, each hand-numbered at the lower right corner of the cover. Poor Moon represents just the second release for Paradise of Bachelors and its first collection of new songs; the year before, the imprint debuted with Said I Had a Vision, a collection of mostly ignored and lost would-be soul hits by a small-town Southern producer and tunesmith named David Lee.
Last week, the California-via-New York label Tompkins Square reissued Poor Moon on CD, giving an album that had quickly sold out in its original form a chance to benefit from wider distribution. Tompkins Square is one of the few extant imprints that could give Poor Moon a proper and permanent presence, or one with an aesthetic that fit not only Paradise of Bachelors but also Hiss Golden Messenger. For the last decade, after all, Tompkins Square has dug deep into both the past and present to deliver soulful music in all its numerous guises, whether that's meant box sets of astonishing gospel performances or the one-man-string-band exhortations of Frank Fairfield. Poor Moon thrives on an absolute Pan-American musical alchemy, where classic country and bar-band rock, pristine bluegrass and subversive funk whittle their own way into the same perfect grooves. This is new music that uses the past like a catapult-- into songs that understand their pedigrees without kowtowing to them. Tompkins Square is a readymade home.
Hiss Golden Messenger is, at its core, Durham, N.C., songwriter M.C. Taylor and New York multi-instrumentalist Scott Hirsch; in the late 1990s, Hirsch and Taylor anchored San Francisco's the Court & Spark, an intriguing act that attempted to till the soil between indie rock and alt-country scenes long before listeners seemed so Fleet Foxes-ready. Poor Moon is the fourth Hiss Golden Messenger album, but it feels in a sense like a debut, or at least some grand curtain finally being pulled back. By far the band's most developed effort, Poor Moon was recorded with a cast of 16 guitarists, string players, horn players, drummers, pickers, and singers and revisits several tunes from past Hiss Golden Messenger albums-- in effect, funneling the band's widespread oeuvre into this one discrete moment.
It works: Poor Moon is a fantastic, on-repeat record that recalls the aesthetic risks and rewards of the best stuff produced by Laurel Canyon's singer-songwriters and, decades later, the stylistically daring musicians associated with New Weird America. Hiss Golden Messenger pairs an instant accessibility with careful complexity; the hook of opener "Blue Country Mystic", for example, is inescapable, but the song's sudden twists and sprints and minute musical details provide a framework of constant unpredictability. There's a beautiful bluegrass trot in the middle and a string-lined country-soul template at the end, but those are exceptions. Instead, Poor Moon largely depends upon the band's ability to hide the seams of its polyglot proclivities. Traces of funk and dub ripple warmly beneath the banjo of "Drummer Down" and the keyboard flourishes of "Jesus Shot Me in the Head", while "Super Blue (Two Days Clean)" washes psychedelic warmth gently over an incisive bar-rock clip. The sidewinding acoustic guitars of the instrumental "Dreamwood" rise from a haze of nocturnal field recordings, suggesting Sir Richard Bishop sitting in with the sounds of a surrounding swamp. These innovative melds put Hiss Golden Messenger in the company of contemporaries like Megafaun, Doug Paisley, and Lambchop, all acts who have lifted from the past with steady visions for the future.
Poor Moon is something of a religious album, but Taylor judiciously applies the same nothing-sacred mentality to his faith that his band delivers to its variegated music. Tying a tight knot between self-definition, self-discovery, and the possibility of self-obliteration, "Jesus Shot Me in the Head" slowly reveals itself to not only be a meditation on giving into God but arguably giving up on life, too. "Daylight" questions the need for good-versus-evil, light-versus dark binaries, suggesting that essential truths get lost at the border between black and white. The same tension ribbons through "Super Blue", the first-person tale of a junkie whose forced sobriety starts to kill him-- at least until he kills it with shots and lines and spontaneous trips down south. "There's a big black horse on a nice straight course/ My bets are fixed/ All right," Taylor sings, his unequivocal sneer embracing and exploring every aspect of addiction all at once.
Taylor uses this album almost like a journal, teasing out various scenarios and debating the proper balance between keeping faith and giving up on it. Musically, for instance, "Under All the Land" might be the album's most easygoing tune, cutting an unlikely path between reggae swagger and country sway. But as Taylor works through his religious indecision, that backdrop makes it clear that he's working again through an age-old debate about service versus selfishness, or about the meaning of freedom in the face of commitment. "It's hard to tell which are kings and which are men," he half-moans, revealing some level of discomfort with both classes. That same blue-collar directness shows up again on "A Working Man Can't Make No Way", an exasperated acoustic rollick surrounded by sighing steel guitar. Here, Taylor puts the woes of the Bible-reading, all-toiling commoner in the harsh daylight of reality. No matter how much the narrator works, heaven inevitably takes his parents; earning a simple wage strips any leisure time he could have ever had, rewarding his allegiance with no earthly sanctuary. Ever so gently, our man rebels: "My bosses can just go to hell," Taylor sings, easing the imprecation skyward. "Tell 'em all I don't give a damn."
It's difficult not to revel in the fortuitous timing of Poor Moon, an album that treats hard times like the only through-line of existence but keeps pressing ahead. At a moment when the international economy seems on the brink of unfathomable faults, when people's rights are being questioned on the basis of religion, and when battles of lesser evils are the only ones seemingly left to be won, Poor Moon offers a steadying sort of balm. Never pedantic or didactic, never extreme or aggressive, Poor Moon is a warm hand on a cold shoulder, a vintage piece of soul music for new times in need.
