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On Papa M Sings, Dave Pajo found his voice, a croon that sounds not unlike everyone's favorite musical misanthrope, Dancin' Bill Callahan. On Whatever, Mortal, Pajo is again at the mic for much of the record, but what he finds across its sizeable scope is his own etched-out evocation of Americana. With help from Louisvillian brethren Will Oldham, Tara Jane O'Neil, and Britt Walford, Pajo rolls out across musical landscapes evocative of the most familiar imagery — woods and dustbowls and stations and stretched-out heat-hazed highways — but allayed with unfamiliar arrangement. Coming from an experimental place, Pajo forsakes the traditional for the personal, his instrumental meanderings bled with idiosyncrasy, with occasional flourishes — a crackled signal here, a Simpsons sample there — reminiscent of the strange musical web he spun on his last Papa M longplayer Live From a Shark Cage. This, however, is a much different work, with Oldham's strong collaborative influence and a desire for "fuller" musical arrangements leading Pajo down the trails of Smithsonian Folkways. Sometimes his arrangements are straight-up old-timey: croon, guitars, banjo, piano. Other times they're genuinely strange, like on the wandering "Sabotage," in which a rollicking guitar-twining piece stops and breaks out in a full sitar-strutting ragga before reinventing itself, again, as an upbeat, strummy, suitably Smoggy pop-song. Lyrically, on Whatver, Mortal, Pajo's penmanship recalls the works and words of Oldham and Appendix Out's Alisdair Roberts; with Our Man Dave deliberately deploying folksong idioms to tie his own tunes to a tradition that goes far beyond the Paul Bunyan-esque presence of the late John Fahey on his last album, and far further back than recent revisionism.
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