Okay... I done owed this one since August of 2012. Sometimes better late than never may not be applicable, but I can always keep my fingers crossed, eh?
Stars Pulled Down by Unextraordinary Gentlemen
Unextraordinary Gentlemen have been sketching out their
particular vision of another time and place fantastic and anachronistic for
some time now. Two EPs, 5 Tales From God Only Knows and No Hands to Guide Us, have collected
tales of the desperate, disparate, and debauched. Set to Romanticism soundscapes interpreted in part by the
archaic machineries of an industrial revolution, these two offerings have
familiarized UXG’s listeners with a Victorian Neverwas inhabited by the noble
and the questionable engaged in voyages extraordinaires. A very European parlour type of
Victorian, there has been a strong cane and bussel and top-hattedness to them
that is very properish. But the
new longplay, Stars Pulled Down, has
delved into something, for lack of a better term, very American. This new offering finds Unextraordinary
Gentlemen having emigrated from the Old World to the New, the wild borders of
an indifferent mechanical hinterland whose flesh and bone gears grind
themselves away in struggles with mortality and excess.
As with its predecessors, Stars Pulled Down is a collection of musings chronicling forays
into both the temporal and the fantastical. But while UXG’s previous tales unfolded within cosmopolitan
settings, this stage is a no man’s land of fog shrouded forest hilltops, frontier
towns weathered gray, and sun-scorched peripheries. The struggles the characters undergo are familiar, but the
savagery demanded by these uncivilized locales is that of a brave
new world of ruggedness and rough-hewn independence, more whiskey than absinthe.
The most fascinating aspect of Stars Pulled Down is its musical “folkiness.” There’s a dustiness and
Appalachian-ness to its sound wholly appropriate for its duster-clad pioneer and
outlaw characters, but it is accomplished without the cliché of banjos and
other instruments associated with “old timey.” Instead, a spareness and primitiveness of electronic instrumentation
has been employed to carefully fold the “feeling” of the homegrown, the down
home, into the soundscapes. And
atop these brooding sonic terrains a violin casts strains of the olde world, its
classical refrains coarsened by the “music of the people” that defines this new
unexplored place.
As the listener travels from the Sherman’s March-ishness of
“Elephant Head,” through the dimensional warping voyage of “Almost Imaginary,”
and into the Gothic Americana playground rhyming of “Kiss the Earth” it is very
clear that UXG is moving into new territory. They even offer a traditional protest tune in “Dawn/Worst of
All,” a dirgey account of miners descending into the grave everyday only to
resurrect for a few fleeting hours of unrest before the dawn calls them down
into the earth once more. And if
these tunes are not pointing out clearly enough the direction UXG is edging in,
with “Old No. 9” they present the most venerated of all roots music genres: the
train song. And the ghostly Old
No. 9 is not just any train. It’s the juggernaut of steam and steel that
carries us to the farthest reach of the new domain Unextraordinary Gentlemen is
exploring, the End of the Line.
And in these shifting, uncertain sands of mystery lies the leaving point
for “Long Time Gone,” a lament of wanderlust, perhaps the wanderlust that has
brought us to this new borderland in the first place. And what lies beyond?
A new frontier? The
gallows? Perhaps simply “The End
Again.”
Start yer voyage here:
http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/unextraordinarygentlemen2
