Folk

Snaex: The 10,000 Things

Sam

Living with Snaex

Giving the finger to a time of moral crisis

There’s something kind of thrilling about the cover to the second Snaex record. Check it out:

On that black and white cover of The 10,000 Things, Chriss Sutherland’s and Christopher Teret’s wives give us the finger, in unison, while their toddlers sit in their laps, even nurse. Their eyes are darkened, making them menacing, but their mouths are set in something more like determination. A mix of that classic Johnny Cash shot and, well, Duccio’s “Madonna and Child.”

And it’s all a big fuck you to what? Us? Sutherland and Teret’s lingering dreams of making music for others to consume? Society at large?

How about the almighty, himself?

It’s hard not to draw that conclusion after the slow rock of “Most High,” with its crunchy electric guitars propping up a series of lyrics that paint a domestic picture of faith that’s been shaken: “There’s a meal in the oven / And there’s a baby on my knee … And nobody lives in the sky/ But I try to walk in the path of the most high.”

That’s Teret (you’ve heard him in Company), whose delivery is lower down and more precise in the enunciation than Sutherland’s, so that the song resonates right through your gut.

Sutherland, instead, has a keen that’s more piercing, mimicked in “Words” by a pinging guitar tone that etches out a sparse melody in the break. It pushes past the limiters and distorts in the headphones just as Sutherland seems to spiral through emotions: “I am something incomplete / That complains constantly / In here words make me alone / And out there I don’t matter at all.”

Of course, these guys matter as much as anyone, locally, plying as they do any manner of outsider forms and structures. Sutherland has been consistently important since Cerberus Shoal in the 1990s, and his joining with Teret makes for a folk that’s edgy and unnerving in all the right ways.

Especially with the remixing of three tunes from the debut Snaex album, Creep Down, from 2012. With the Ugly Facade adding ghosts of digitized beats and bass kicks to what began as stripped down acoustic pieces recorded live, they are given detachment, like Sutherland and Teret are just along for the ride. “Come Clean” is maybe the most distilled of these efforts, coming in at 3:33 and seemingly built for a radio station that doesn’t exist (or, rather, WMPG), full of harmony and a pulsing intensity: “It’s not their fault they need to feed their little ones.”

Further pushing your emotional buttons are a series of vignettes, samples accompanied by distant and muted piano, that stand up for the downtrodden. “At the End of the Day” is terrifically disturbing, with some CNN bobblehead using that most meaningless of clichés to introduce the fact that it’s “simply a question of whether Israel gets tired of continuing to bomb a civilian population.”

Ya know, like the whole Palestinian conflict ends with Netanyahu one day turning to Rivlin and declaring: “I’m bored. Let’s go do something else.”

And then there is Martin Luther King, Jr., agreeing with Dante in “When Silence Is Betrayal”: “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” With so much commercial music today trying desperately to be morally vanilla, Snaex are more than welcome in their button-pushing.

Cutting most to the quick, though, is Sutherland’s “Daddy,” an exploration of his relationship with his father, done with a pop melody that cuts through distorted electric guitar: “It was hard, the way you left us that day.” There’s a rolling fingerstyle guitar, a reticent snare, and a naked regret.

“In me is a piece of you,” Sutherland wails, “I spring from us in the other direction / I fear us and our lost connection.”

And through it all, those babies stare out from the record’s sleeve, a reminder of the dad Sutherland has a chance to be, even if the world is full of bullshit you’d rather not have your kid muddle through. “We don’t talk about heaven,” Teret sings on the closing cover of Lucinda Williams’s “Blue,” an organ bleeding through, “we don’t talk about hell.” Instead, we live in the moment and do the best we can with what we have.

Tumbling Bones: Loving a Fool

Sam

Digging up the past

Tumbling Bones sing sweetly on Loving a Fool

If Believe, the debut full-length from Ghost of Paul Revere, seemed like a haymaker in the scrap for local roots vocal supremacy when it was released in 2013, then Tumbling Bones, with the brand-new Loving a Fool, prove they can take one on the chin and give what-for in their own right.

Of course, such competitions are the constructs of music writers with too much time on their hands, but it’s fun to imagine the two bands going toe to toe. Both take immense care with their harmonic construction, arranging their varied voices to emphasize dynamic range in ways that go beyond the standard way of joining along for the chorus.

Each band threw opening jabs with an early and promising EP. Now Tumbling Bones have followed Ghost’s release earlier this year with a full-length debut of their own, equally impressive in its construction and execution.

While Ghost of Paul Revere lean contemporary with their roots, however, taking their string band in the direction of the Northwest big-string-band sound, Bones lean much more traditional, mining well-formed old-Nashville and bluegrass songwriting. In fact, they go so far as to include a Bill Monroe/Bessie Lee Maudlin tune, “Voice from on High,” that they recorded to sound like it’s issuing from an old cabinet radio, around which a family might have gathered in the days when there wasn’t much else to do after dark.

And it sounds sorta crappy, to tell the truth, like being old-timey just for old-timey’s sake.

Most of the time, though, the band succeed in mining traditional songs and affectations without coming off too precious. Maybe the best indication of this is that their bouncing back and forth between standards and their own works is completely seamless.

Those of you who listen to albums front to back might notice that Kyle Morgan handles vocals and songwriting on the odd songs to open: one, three, five, and seven. Even employed in different stylistic approaches, his voice is hard to miss, like Rufus Wainwright, but with a shit-eating grin while he’s doing it. “Broken Things,” the opener, is the stand-out, with a standard turnaround construction that’s warmly familiar and a flawed protagonist: “A wilted flower, a soiled gown/ She don’t have many unbroken vows.”

If they sound a bit like the Tricky Britches at times, it’s no surprise. They mine the same general back catalog and employ the Britches’ Tyler Leinhardt on the fiddle. On “Broken Things” he’s in unison with Jake Hoffman’s banjo, while on Rotten Belly Blues’ “Money Is for Spending” he trades licks with the electric guitar, introducing the first instrumental break and finishing off the second.

In between, Chris Connors and Tim Findlen rise up the percussion with hand claps and shaker in a way that augments the grit of the electric and is mostly noticeable for the void it leaves when it drops away. It’s part of the same kind of gypsy jazz vibe at which the Burners excel and which the Bones ply also on the minor-fueled “How They’re Rolling,” where Peter Winne just carves the song up with a bracing harmonica.

Winne’s writing contribution is much more mellow, though. “This Time Last Year” is like Elvis doing “Blue Christmas,” just a little bit goofy, but with an edge provided by Findlen’s saw near the finish. It certainly has the feel of a Ringo track on a Beatles album.

The title track, a waltz with a brushed snare to emphasize the time signature, seems more fully in the Bones wheelhouse, with just a flavor of contemporary indie delivery. Morgan gives it just a touch Brit-pop in making “fool” two and three syllables even while Findlen makes his uke sound an awful like a trad bluegrass mandolin.

Really, there’s not much they get wrong, but my taste tends toward their more hard-charging takes. Their two-minute “Bound to Ride” is pitch-perfect, with a rolling banjo and just the right wild abandon in the vocals, similar to the way Dark Hollow Bottling Company (RIP) nailed their “Kicking My Dog Around” with Jim White on the lead vocals. And the Dixie-flavored “Just Because” is the kind of thing Hot Club of Cowtown does so well, bringing an old line like “just because you think you’re so pretty/ Just because you think you’re so hot” right back to the present day.

This is the kind of debut record where can say things will only get better from here without that being an insult.