Ragged and moody singer-songwriter Americana

Nathan Holscher is proof that you needn’t be in Nashville or Austin to produce Americana. Holscher grew up and was schooled in the Midwest, and after bouncing around the Southwest ended up in Cincinnati, a city long ago known for the hillbilly records issued on the King label. Roy Rogers was born in Cincinnati, and Pure Prairie League formed in Columbus, but more recently the Queen City has turned out soul acts such as Bootsy Collins, the Isley Brothers and Afghan Whigs, and garage/indie rock from the Greenhornes and Heartless Bastards. So it’s without a lot of recent local roots music history that Nathan Holscher drops his third full-length album, populated with dark, downtrodden country and folk songs.

These songs are more anguished than those on two previous outings, 2004’s Pray for Rain and 2007’s Even the Hills. Holscher’s earlier work was agitated and even chipper, but his latest band, Ohio 5, builds more atmospheric arrangements from drums, piano, guitar, bass organ and pedal steel. His ragged vocals sound pained and heartbroken as he catalogs the emotional wreckage of a doomed engagement, with growing doubts strewn along the road trip of “Along the Way.” He tries to prolong broken relationships and on the ‘50s-styled ballad “Only One” hopes for a lover’s change of mind. Holscher sounds crushed as he chokes out an ex-con’s pining on “Seven Years,” and the title track’s frustrated jab at a drug addicted friend feels as fated to fail as the addict himself.

Obviously this isn’t your feel-good album of 2009, but the slow, moody productions provide the right backing for Holscher’s dissipated vocal style. He comes across as intimate and confessional, but he sings as someone exhaling his troubles at the end of a long and trying ordeal rather than as a storyteller trying to make an explicit point. He describes his work as letting “the song steer the ship,” and the results seep out as circumstance rather than drama. It’s precisely that casual reveal of character and storyline that makes this release arresting. [©2009 hyperbolium dot com]

MP3 | Along the Way
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