(2021) Jeffrey Alexander and the Heavy Lidders - Jeffrey Alexander and the Heavy Lidders


Review:
These are languid, spectral grooves, anchored in folk and blues but allowed to spin off into the distance. Slow, haunted choruses float free of a jangling, acoustic base, little flares of blues-bent notes going off in the margins. These songs take their time to loosen and relax, pursuing repetitive vamps until the edges melt away and the hard colors swirl into pastels. The Heavy Lidders — even the band name promises sleepy dissolution — are a new configuration made up of West Coast outfolker , plus Elkhorn’s Jesse Shepard and Drew Gardner and Kouhoutek’s Scot Verrastro on drums. Guests including Marissa Nadler, Pat Gubler, Rosali and Ryley Walker drummer Ryan Jewell stop by to join the jams. Alexander is a fixture in a free-wheeling, Grateful Dead-loving, guitar jam underground, a founder of the Iditarod and Black Forest/Black Sea and a sometime member of Jackie O Motherfucker. The last time we caught up with him, he was fronting Direwolves, a nouveau folk-jam outfit shading gently into kraut-y propulsion. Here, in long, drifting originals like “Audubon Trooper,” luminous textures unfurl, a slow roll of percussion with icy shards of vibraphone filtering in, nodding cadences of bass and spiraling mandalas of guitar. Nature is a primary inspiration for Alexander. He sings about trees here with a worn-in familiarity. Yet though trees are trees, they also stand in for something deeper and more significant, as does music, as does life itself. Alexander finds hidden resonance in plain words, uncanny echoes in wholly recognizable instrumental tones. Everything is itself. Everything stands in for the infinite. “Dark Ships in the Forest” is somewhat more straightforward, with a forthright rock drum beat with the push of bass behind it. The lyrics recount natural and human-made disaster—fires burning out of control, children in cages—in a grounded, realistic way. And yet, even here, in a dense, full-band, rock arrangement, there’s a mist of the unordinary hanging over. Even ripped from the headlines, the song carries a sense of mystery. A couple of covers hint at where Alexander comes from. He takes on “Black Peter,” from the Grateful Dead’s 1969 back-to-folk-basics album Workingman’s Dead (surely it’s not coincidental that this is the one with a song called “Dire Wolf”). His version is even more pared back and slouchy than the original. It moves at a mournful crawl, undulating guitar licks twisting off into bent notes. Nadler shadows Alexander’s tripped out vocals in a high, pure, distant soprano, sending a shiver through the mix. The music seems to hardly move at all; it has the stillness of a hot day at noon, asphalt throwing heat mirages into the air. Later, Alexander revisits Gene Clark’s “Strength of Strings,” from the 1974 album No Other. Clark’s version was massively orchestrated with a huge choir, piano and strings. Alexander’s is far more reticent, lit by eerie, jazzy bits of vibraphone, his wavering voice bolstered, just a bit, by airy female backing vocals. If Clark blew up his mystic vision into an all-hands showstopper, Alexander lets his flicker in the twilight, inviting listeners in but very gently.  If you like your campfire singalongs quiet, contemplative and with ghosts flitting through the branches overhead, this record is for you. — dusted





Track Listing:
1.Beowulf's Trip 06:33
2.Black Peter 05:52
3.Herb of Grace 02:42
4.Dark Ships in the Forest 04:49
5.Carousel of Flowers 05:51
6.Audubon Trooper 08:58
7.Strength of Strings 04:28


Media Report:
Genre: folk-rock, psychedelic rock
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