If it's all-important to wield the shtick, Town and Country are definitely
bearing arms. The Chicago-chops crew have a devotion to playing only the
acoustic instruments; and, given that they're the typical
studio-dorks-of-the-new-age (i.e.: like, totes obsessed with playing a million
different trinkets on any recording), it's hardly the surprise that the
rockband have frolicked further and further into the unending Elysian fields
of exotic instrumentage, the grass being always greener in the lands where
the cats play karkabas, guimbri, kalimba, and shakuhachi. Of course,
cheap-and-nasty new-age-flotation-tank discs often abuse the exotic in their
Muzak, so just wearing those things, listed, on the sleeve of your handsome
record jacket ain't enough to have listeners banging the gong. And even the
hippest humanoids can seem Max Fischeresque in their dilettantish dabbling
when teasing and testing so many frontiers; and, at times, across the course
of the six-disc/four-album litany, the T&C jamboree have seemed a little
like a bunch of music dorks trying things on to see what fits.
It was only
on their last longplayer, 5, that the crew tried to put their money
where their instrument-store receipts were, claiming to have wholeheartedly
embraced Japanese Gagaku court music as they diddled and fiddled and
finger-cymbaled their way through stately suites of faux-avant-gardism
played with all the deft reverence of a chamber quartet.
Up Above
follows on from such, avoiding electricity as Town and Country rattle up all
sorts of drones, with harmonium, accordion, organ and the human throat
wailing away whilst the crew clatter out arrhythmic rhythmia on a menagerie
of tuned percussion. Ben Vida's guitar, once the staple of this outfit, has
been seemingly consigned to only its Bird Show life, the set setting its
controls for the heart of sun blazing with flaming let's-go-ethno-musickry!, a burning ring of faux-fire-music(k) in which an acoustic guitar is too
totally like Western and bourgeois and shit. Up Above Is, in such, a
gentle enough jam to work/non-work in an incidentalist sense; but compare it
to folk that do this sort of gear with a fearsome seriousness — like, most
obviously, the Vibracathedral Orchestra — and T&C come up as pale as a
Midwestern mid-winter tan.
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