Stars Pulled Down by Unextraordinary Gentlemen

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