The makers of These 13 met at a pivotal moment in their lives. Back in 1994, Jimbo Mathus’ band the Squirrel Nut Zippers were just starting to put their stamp on a host of pre-rock musical styles, from jazz and swing to klezmer. They ran into Andrew Bird at the Black Mountain Music Festival, where he was playing fiddle, and eventually invited him to play on 1996’s Hot, which went multi-platinum off the unlikely popularity of the single “Hell,” a song that describes eternal damnation in gruesome detail. Although never a core member, Bird recorded and occasionally toured with the Zippers throughout the ‘90s, when they were misfiled under swing revival alongside groups with Daddy in their names. While Cherry Poppin’ Daddies and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy borrowed willy-nilly from big band influences, the Zippers were more specific and knowledgeable—they freely commingled hot jazz with jump blues, irreverent string-band folk and Depression-era pop.
These 13 is not Bird and Mathus’ first time playing together since then. In fact, Bird played on “Train on Fire,” from last year’s Lost Songs of Doc Souchon. But it is their first close and sustained collaboration, with the duo recording these songs mostly live around a single mic and no other musicians intruding. Somber, spare, and amiable, these 13 songs draw from a range of old styles, primarily gospel. The gap between the Zippers’ heyday and this reunion only reveals how they’ve grown as artists, each taking the band’s anything-goes lessons in opposite directions. Bird’s music is based on flights of fancy, running folk through his looping pedal and whistling like a theremin on top of it. Mathus, on the other hand, has plumbed old-school country and rural blues. Bird can sound too clever, Mathus not clever enough. But These 13 allows each to compensate for the shortcomings of the other while playing up what makes them distinctive. Their voices and instruments combine effortlessly, like old friends getting together for coffee.
Still, there is also something oddly old-fashioned about this music and the sentiments they’re putting across. “Poor Lost Souls” surveys the homeless situation in Los Angeles and sees wasted potential in the men and women who are “just a lump of coal” when they “could have been a diamond.” It plays more like a cover of an old song than a new original, like something the Louvin Brothers might have sung on Satan Is Real, yet this odd ventriloquism can be weirdly distancing, especially for a song about crushing poverty. The downcast “Red Velvet Rope” heads toward the opposite end of the class spectrum, dreaming up a celebrity romance where a lover competes with a legion of fans for affection. Disconnected from any current celebrity culture, it sounds unexpectedly stuffy, as though they’ve unearthed an outtake from a Gold Diggers musical from the ‘30s.
Even if they do get lost in the past, both Mathus and Bird remain attuned to the morality of folk music, whether urban or rural. They seem to understand that it enables empathy and compassion in the performer as well as in the listener, which plays into the hymn-like quality of the music. In fact, the best moments on These 13 sit you down in a hard wooden pew in a little church somewhere far from any city. On “Stonewall (1863),” Mathus sings like he’s leading a congregation in fellowship, speaking each line before singing it. It’s an old technique used in churches without access to hymn books—a means of making sure that everyone can experience the fellowship and community that comes with simply singing along.
The chorus of that song, however, is darker than such a description implies. “Let us now cross over the river,” Mathus and Bird sing together, “and rest ‘neath the shade of the trees.” Death looms over these songs, although the duo describe heaven without the baggage of culture-war Christianity. Mathus revels in the Book of Revelations imagery of closer “Three White Horses & a Golden Chain,” which describes an unusual funeral parade. “You’re gonna need somebody when you come to die,” they sing as the album draws to its close, and these two lifelong friends sound like they’ve got each other covered.
Buy: Rough Trade
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