We review “The Singer in My Band” by This Is Lorelei
Nate Amos has been making it clear to us for more than ten years with This Is Lorelei who belongs to that rare lineage of artists who like to operate outside of any generational coordinates or dominant grammar. Even now, when he signs for Matador Records, the guy continues to go his way and delivers us with “The Singer in My Band” a bluegrass pop album confessedly heir to his true musical tradition apart from his work in Water From Your Eyes.
That their education and heritage have been closely linked to the codes of the aforementioned genre is something that, of course, we have always seen in their freelance work to a greater or lesser extent; but it is here where Amos has decided to embrace this debt without reservation, counting on his family in the credits (from his father, Bob Amos, bluegrass legend, to his sister Sarah and her partner Al) and making the commonplaces of this atavistic artistic movement more his own than ever.
For example, we see him accelerate the tempo, usually slow and contemplative in country, in pieces like “Watching Heaven Fall”: a semi-orthodox call for much of his well-known imagery (train stations, bandits, urban prophets, moving landscapes), converted here into a catalyst for an eminently narrative composition. In fact, it could well be said that the album itself serves as an assertion of that fictional universe that Amos has been populating for years with recurring characters and inhospitable geographies, each of its themes being pages of a larger story in continuous development.
It is now the wandering voices of Joey, Billy, Miss B, Genevieve, Sarah or the already veteran Buddy who are in charge of continuing that river novel that is the discography of This Is Lorelei, at times devoted to phonic reiteration and verbal musicality (“Oh No Now Why”) and at others to the more intimate nineties and acoustic slowcore (“Hey Sarah Is It Gonna Rain Forever”). Hiding himself in the benefits of anonymity through third and extravagant people, Amos goes miles with an almost Spartan simplicity, overcoming despite his austerity in resources the risk of conceiving an extremely homogeneous songbook and even delivering several samples of his natural instinct for melody with contagious ballads (“Sailing (Your Baby’s Down)”) and faithful x-rays of the American asphalt (“And I Haven’t Seen My Love in Quite a While”).
From the syncopated banjo chords in the homonymous “The Singer In My Band” to that strictly instrumental interlude with pure guitar and violin strumming titled “Nitro”, it is clear that, for this new stage, in his one-man project Amos has advocated for an evident continuity of the brand, elevating to a next scale his whim for short, but narratively copious songs and for the desacralization of the verse with abrupt bets on the break casual and humanized (“When the seer on the subway said we’d burn in hell / we all laughed it off and said we might as well”). It is, paradoxically, by looking back where the artist makes his music sound more in control of its own future than ever before.
