Bark Hide and Horn
National Road
Boy Howdy Records
By Jose Fritz
There is an immense rusty chain running through modern Americana backwards into the bellies of the Appalachian songsters of a hundred years ago. Before the advent of rock n’ roll there was already a division between songsters and country music. In that time, country music was considered upscale compared to hillbilly music, more civilized and proper. The difference between them is the same as the difference between Waylon Jennings and Mance Lipscomb. A country musician played bars, speakeasies, blind pigs, and county fairs. The country musician eventually even played on the radio. The songster played for corn liquor on the porch, and played the unexpurgated folk songs of men.
There isn’t much left of that tradition today. While bands still play for beer, they don’t show up on your porch, and their repertoire is usually more limited. Bark Hide and Horn seems to have navigated their way around roots rock to find the actual roots. These traditional folk structures resemble Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers as much as James McMurtry and Rock Plaza Central. They evade that toe-tapping vagary, that finger-snapping, dust-raising, banjo-plucking, moon-shining side of the genre. There’s none that stomping on the porch feeling here. It’s of the Ozarks: not of Cowboy Copas, not of Okkervil River.
Instead trumpets and a bevy of horns bleat and coo melancholy truths and lies and uncertainties over slow baselines, tying it all together like the straight iron rebar in the Pacific Railroad. Andy Anderson Furgeson’s vocals are thoughtful, almost contrite. His tone and balance unites a set of songs that might otherwise be disparate. Together they make the album sempiternal the first song into the second into the third and so on until the last flows into the first.
It is so hard to be a balladeer for the depraved and morbid, so much easier to sing love songs. It’s a cross to bear, on par with pancreatitis, gall stones, male pattern baldness and sacroiliac dysfunction. Ferguson sings about the yellowed pages of a stack of National Geographic magazines, ugly faux-wood paneling and Melville. His lyrics makes songs like “Change It” into alt/country monoliths alongside the best works of Neutral Milk Hotel. They pale the Handsome Family in their tattered gothic trappings, and unfashionable addictions OTC drugs
I will love this record forever. When I’m old, bald, limping and gray and writing about the pathetic, hollow nostalgia for Spoon, and The Walkmen, I’ll remember. I’ll remember and I’ll go to the record shelf and Bark Hide and Horn will still have made a damn fine record. I’ll get it out and I’ll sing along to “National Road” and I’ll be very depressed about the direction the world has taken and the sad, sad places I’ve been:
“This morning I woke from my American Dream
I crammed the family in the station wagon with everything
We need to spend the summer living out my husband’s notion of freedom
Living on the road to his American Dream
Highway 40 is a river of concrete and steel
Moving westward with the current of automobiles
Men with the rising horizon and their hands on the wheel
The women tending to the children and the feeding and fear.”
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