(2022) Joseph Allred - The Rambles & Rags of Shiloh    


Review:
Multi-instrumentalist Joseph Allred is a broad-reaching musician who has set to tape many of his stylistic shifts in the past, illustrating a diverse creative nature and ability with instruments and voice. For The Rambles & Rags of Shiloh, he sticks to six and twelve-string guitar plus banjo to paint a wide-ranging vista of instrumental narratives through many styles of music. Not to be confused with the biblical city of Shiloh, Joseph’s inspiration was a small community in Overton County, Tennessee, near where his father was born. In the album notes, a sentence describing Shiloh is appropriate for the music: ‘A place where the spheres of past and present, dead and living, immanent and transcendent, overlap.’ Less of an overlap than a consistent stylistic shift, the evidence of this is immediate, with the opening track Sweetcorn Ramble, itself an innocent and jovial piece of picking with a steady bright rhythm, moving into The Dervish. This Latin-tinged tune features Joseph’s signature tremolo picking style (either on twelve-string guitar or making the six-string sound like one) and fills much of the space between the notes with ringing strings. Joseph is happy to wander back and forth across the fretboard on this one, creating a tune that is rich and sturdy until it moves into a far simpler pattern in the final third, losing the fast picking and again using space to emphasise another change in style, this time within the same song. Conversely, again, Linville Rag sets us firmly in Jack Rose ragtime territory. A comparatively simple piece in the set, this one nails the thumb rhythm and picks a sweet little tune on the treble strings. It’s gone in a couple of minutes, moving into the first banjo song. Very much in the old-time style, Joseph subtly alters the pace of the picked and strummed strings on Overture for Lodge No. 637-01, giving the song a soporific feel in places and an anarchic mood towards the end. Finishing with more tremolo picking before revisiting the previous refrain, this one is another example of the number of changes Joseph fits into each of his complex pieces. Further on, Before the Lord starts with a slowly picked pattern with sparsely double-thumbed bass notes to suggest pensive melancholy. The body of the piece is far different, upping the tempo and lifting the mood with dexterous flourishes across the fretboard. The Emerald City immediately brings to mind Chuck Johnson’s twelve-string playing on his Crows in the Basilica album before Joseph moves back into tremolo picking, creating a rich tapestry of sound. Closer Blues for Terry Tuttle couldn’t be more different; a gently played slide piece with scraped string sound and plenty of space, it is one of the most quietly enjoyable of this whole wonderfully varied set.


   


Track List:
01 - Sweetcorn Ramble
02 - The Dervish
03 - Linville Rag
04 - Overture for Lodge No. 637
05 - Dance of the Fair Folk
06 - Before the Lord
07 - The Emerald City
08 - West Fork Rag
09 - March of the True Bugs
10 - Blues for Terry Turtle


Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk
Country: USA
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


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