(2021) New Bums - Last Time I Saw Grace


Review:
Ben Chasny and Donovan Quinn first recorded as New Bums in 2014, when Chasny who had recently moved back to California, ended up living quite close to Quinn. Both had a way of infusing bile and orneriness into soft, unobtrusive formats, Chasny sticking closer to the psychedelic folk of his Six Organs project and Skygreen Leopards’ Quinn constructing intricate jangle-pop conundrums out of sighs and black humor. Now the odd couple of acid folk is back (though who is Felix and who is Oscar is anyone’s guess) with another passel of slow strummed, smoke-wreathed bedroom pop tunes that are easy on the ears without being exactly easy listening. Eleven cuts drift by in a fug of daydream and cannabis, with some tipping more towards Chasny and others to Quinn. One is a cover of Deep Purple guitarist Tommy Bolin’s “Wild Dogs,” which came out on Teaser in 1975, just as his main gig was winding down, and someone (Chasny?) gets off a blistering classic rock guitar solo without disturbing the slumberous vibe. The cleverest songs, lyrically speaking, have a Skygreen Leopards vibe, like Kinks tunes heard through a staticky radio broadcast. The jangle runs placidly, but the words do complicated acrobatics. So, opener “Billy God Damn” plays the blues like a half-dozing street busker mumbling over stinging slides, but the lyrics snap to attention with internal rhymes (“Taste the apocalypse on my lips”) and Dylan-esque asides (“Where I lose the game of Lord of the flies to the denim-clad creature with Spanish inquisition eyes”).  “Cover Band,” another single, is another clever one, its dreamy, clouds of verse and chorus coalescing around surprisingly exact renditions of a life in music. A pretty singer takes off because someone in the band tells her she’s playing the tambourine too hard. The band cranks out chestnuts like “Candle in the Wind” and “Back in Black” and tries to sneak in an original here and there. It’s funny but there’s an undercurrent of melancholy in verses like, “The drunks all curse and call out for the same old songs. I wonder if they wonder where their youth has gone.” Other songs open up into psychedelic raga reveries in a way that seems very Chasny. “Hermitage Song,” in particular, has his mystic folk vibe in the steady, finger-picked meshes of inner-visioned guitar song and the heady rushes of vocals. It would fit just fine onto Companion Rises, and when I say that, I mean it’s god-damned beautiful. One or the other of the Bums also slips some very searing, very accomplished guitar solos in at various places, a big electric sidewinder slipped into the space between “Obliteration Time”’s verses, a rapid-fire jazz solo at the end of “Onward to Devastation.” All of which adds up to an album that seems laid back and easy, but which in fact includes much that is knotty and difficult. It’s maybe New Drunk America in the sense that you could listen to it drunk, but you probably couldn’t play or write or think of it that way. Last Time I Saw Grace slouches and shrugs and minimizes its skill, but can’t possibly hide it.





Tracklist:
01 - Billy, God Damn
02 - Obliteration Time
03 - Marlene Left California
04 - Onward to Devastation
05 - Wild Dogs
06 - Cover Band
07 - Tuned to Graffiti
08 - Street of Spies
09 - Hermitage Song
10 - So Long, Kus
11 - Follow Them Up the Slope


Media Report:
Genre: indie-folk
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits