Hardcore-Troubadours.com is a website based in Nashville.
I met one of the writers in an amazing venue in East Nashville called the "Family Wash" where touring musicians hang out on their nights off and play music together.
Myself and Ciaran spent 3 nights there drinking and listening to people like Reeves Gabrels (David Bowie) the pedal steel player from Calexico whose name escapes me, Stephen Simmons and other amazing amazing players.
Here is a review she did on the "gavin glass & the holy shakers" record.
Thanks Cricket!
Posted in cricket spazzes, east nashville, some albums we done liked others we ain't - April 7th, 2009 at 3:18 pm by Cricket
Two
Irishmen walk into my bar – wait, this is not a joke! Or maybe it is in
some surrealist way. So, two Irishmen walk into my bar and I end up in
barn at 3 am, drinking grape soda and triple sec from a coffee cup.
Yes, yes, my life is actually more like a circus than the average
American dream. I know. But, the upshot is the fantastic music I get to
hear, and let’s just ignore the painful downside of a grape soda and
triple sec hangover.
Sipping fuzzy grape liquor in that barn, I heard some songs that
made my knees weak. Songs that soared far above the barn, the crap
drink, and the late night, to shower back down in a sound that was
ramshackle good. Songs so new they will not be heard for a while yet.
But do not drown in your envy just yet! All hope is not lost!! Because
there was an album before which has been melting my heart and cleansing
my soul and soothing my hideous grape soda induced headache (surely it
was the soda and not the liquor). Gavin Glass and the Holy Shakers.
Here at HCT I am mostly just a giddy and gleeful spaz about music I
like. I have considered filling my posts with endless anecdotes of how
music matches and shapes the endless saga of my doomed relationships.
Or I could tie everything back to the glory and wonder that is East
Nashville, the pumping, bleeding, broken heart of Music City. But I
generally try to restrain myself from filling your head with these
unnecessary poetics, but sometimes it seems impossible. Gavin Glass is
making it impossible today. Don’t blame this on the hideous grape soda
concoction, oh, no this is all inspired by Gavin Glass’s words and
music.
East Nashville is a magnificent and mysterious place. A place where
anything that can happen. Sure Glass is from Dublin, and was only in
town for 7 days to lay down some tracks, but it is the strange magic of
East Nashville that led me to be sitting there in that barn with him.
It is through that peculiar alchemy of East Nashville, and the places
it takes me and the things it brings, that I am now listening to the Holy Shakers on repeat.
There’s got to be a special name for this sound. What do you call
Americana, roots rock that is Irish? Since traditional Irish music is
the bones of old time music, which is arguably the nervous system of
modern country (sorry, that metaphor does suck), if you take those
bones, those nerves and return them to the land of their birth and
remake the influences of the influences, do you then have something
Frankensteinian and yet cleanly reborn? Yes indeed. And even if it
isn’t exactly new, it’s fresh, crisp, smart and very fulfilling. Or at
least it’s all those things if it’s Gavin Glass and the Holy Shakers.
It could be, and probably has been, said that there is something
vaguely Ryan Adamsesque about this album. Though I think it is more
Whiskeytown, Wilco, and Elvis (both Presley and Costello). It is an
album that is lyrically pretty spectacular and I think because of that
you can’t resist the Ryan Adams comparison (even from me who would
smite Mr. Adams if she could).
The album opens with “Underneath the Stars” which is a very smooth
Alt.country song, ready for radio with its slidey opening guitar and
the crescendo of horns at the end and yet there’s a Springsteen
undercurrent here that saves it from sounding to clean. “Some days
pull on your heart strings/drag you into the fire of burned out
desire/messy situations, undone obligations, you are crying like a
child who did no wrong” sings Glass, and immediately he has me.
This is a song about losing your way when you didn’t know where you
were going to begin with. It’s about having forgotten who you are and
finding yourself again when you realize love is gone. Or maybe it isn’t
about that at all. But every second of this song feels to me like that
day you wake up and realize you’ve been with the wrong person, in the
wrong time and place, and now you are fucked, but somehow much, much
freer for having finally realized it. And now you set out to start all
over again.
There’s a definite old time jazziness to “Sweet Ophelia”, both in
the instrumentation and the incredible backing vocals. “Ragdoll” is
faintly twangy, sweet and strangely sentimental kiss-off song. It has a
gorgeous duet with Cathy Davey. It’s a beautifully done tale of the guy
walking away, and yet the girl gets her sweet and sassy word in, too.
I’m not even exactly sure what “Red Dress” is about but I know it makes
me swoon in a girly way, secretly wishing that I had a red dress and
some boy would sing this song about me. It contains some nifty guitar
riffs that might knock that red dress right off, too. “Jukebox Rag” is
filled with bright, hilly, twangily cheerful banjos, mandolins and
thumpy, toe-tappin’ on the porch rhythms. “Older Than My Years” is
swelled and filled with delicious keyboard sounds and the rest of the
band echoing the guitar line that so neatly reiterates the sense of
loss and pain in this song. “This constellation spells your name”
runs through “Intention” and I feel ripped open like I’m reminded of
why I got every tattoo on my body and how I felt at exactly the moment
I realized that some new love wasn’t love at all. The beginning of
“Silently Mine” has a slow, steady, mellow rock start which slides into
some grandly Hawaiian steel guitar just as Glass sings about “the queen of broken-hearted fools” (do I even need to explain why I like that line?).
The harmonica that opens “Southern Comfort” sets the song in the
sweaty, deep South, until Glass’s vocals delightfully rock you back to
Dublin. This song could be cheesy, with it’s drinking metaphors and yet
something holds it back, perhaps the instrumentation here, or the fact
that by track 6 I am so completely smitten with Glass’s lyrics and
singing that I may no longer be thinking clearly. Much like when I
drink too much whiskey. Not surprisingly the combination of the two
words ‘smitten’ and ‘whiskey’ is how I ended up with most of my worst
boyfriends. Luckily for me Gavin Glass is here to write songs to remind
me of the good and the bad of those relationships, and make me feel
like I’ve risen from the ashes. “Southern Comfort” ends with a round of
“this little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine” which sneaks the Soul sound into the song and somehow completely validates my love for Glass.
The hellfire sermon at the end of “Wrecking Ball” is itself damn
spectacular, though the song could stand on its own without it. This is
a swinging rock song and the drums drive your heart up as they rise,
the backing vocals here have driven in from the 60s to remind us of
rock ‘n roll when the gloss wasn’t yet worn off yet, and you could fall
forever into the sound of a song. The horns make me want to hit the
Stax CD collections as soon as I am done listening to these fine, fine
Holy Shakers. The horns slow down, the choir comes up and we spin into
that hellfire sermon, sounding like it’s coming across radio waves from
70 years in the past.
Wow, that was one of the more self indulgent reviews I’ve ever
written, and you know that’s saying something, since self indulgent is
all I do when it comes to music. I feel like I need a smoke after that.
And some whiskey. And maybe another listen to Gavin Glass and the Holy
Shakers. I’m sure I wasn’t convincing here, but that’s okay, you check
out Glass on his Myspace page and give some of the songs a listen yourself, then head to iTunes and buy ‘em.
And forthcoming is Gavin Glass and the Sacred Thorns (the tracks I
heard in the barn studio), when it arrives I will surely let you know
with as much spastic excitement as I can muster. And y’all know I can
muster quite a lot.