Friday, September 1, 2017

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot - Songs for Mixed Company (2017)




Written by Larry Robertson, posted by blog admin

The first full length album from Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Songs for Mixed Company, is the apex of achievement thus far for the singing and songwriting tandem of Phil Barry and Sarah Fuerst. Both musical artists have long pedigrees on the indie scene and bring their combined experiences together in a way certain to leave more than a few mouths agape. The album’s ten tracks make it very clear that the duo’s grounding in folk and other Americana music tradition remains the foundation of everything they do, but the collection seldom stops there. It ventures relatively far afield with Mellotron touches and often seems just as content pushing nuanced heartland rock as it does carefully exploring material on the backs of the acoustic guitar alone. Other instruments like strings, organ, and accordion make appearances on this release and organist Mike Lynch, in particular, emerges from these songs as a key for the duo to fully realize their ambitions.

Things begin on a hushed note with the track “Let’s Be Friends”. The duo clearly aren’t attempting to refashion the songwriting wheel, but their take on their relatively familiar subject, the breakup of a long term connection and ensuing aftermath, finds them sifting through the rubble with a level of sensitivity and discernment uncommon to even the finest genre performers. “Miss Me” is the album’s clearest dive into classic country waters and the duo deliver with a stylish tearjerker that, while manipulating the listener’s emotions, never rings false. The song really begins moving during its second half and this particular configuration plays with such sympathetic tightness that they come off sounding like a band who’s been playing with one another for years. Phil Barry takes over the bulk of vocal duties on the song “Can’t Be Trusted” and makes deadly serious a lyric that might have been a real eye roll in lesser hands. The shadows cast from the guitar playing lend the lyrics a certain poetic gravitas they might have otherwise lacked, but Barry’s vocal here is pitch perfect and inviting despite the subject matter.

“Goodbye is Not the End” might possess a more playful aura than many of the earlier songs, but there’s much of the same sense of loss pervading its lyric that we hear in the album’s more nominally “serious” tracks. “Vesper” is a beautiful instrumental, unexpected from this duo and particularly so deep into the album, but it sets up a nice contrast with the next song “Sweetest Baby”. The musical mood lightens and we’re treated to the juxtaposition between buoyant music and unhappy lyrical content that helped earlier songs stand out. The penultimate song, “I’m on Fire”, brings us an unlikely cover from Bruce Springsteen’s eighties period and the duo wisely makes no attempt to ape the Boss. Instead, they lower the volume while retaining the same thread of lust tying both versions again.  Songs for Mixed Company is, for devotees of the genre, the sort of release you’ve been waiting for guided by artists capable of speak from their own and to our personal pain within.

No comments:

Post a Comment