HORSE FEATHERS and JOE PUG
HORSE FEATHERS
Justin Ringle has turned out to be a songwriter strongly influenced by the seasons. His Portland, Oregon-based band’s last record, the critically acclaimed House With No Home, was a winter album par excellence, from its chilly cover art to its frostbitten songs of loneliness and loss. But from the first piano notes of the title track, plinking like spring rain on a windowpane, Thistled Spring shows itself to be an album of rebirth, renewal, and fragile hope. The sun is out in the world evoked by this music, and in the first couple of songs it feels like the sun of early spring, glinting on a frosty river where the ice is just breaking up. “Thistled Spring” and “Starving Robins” both continue Ringle’s trademark use of space in songwriting, but in this case the space is full of potential, like the spaces between drops of melting snow. The sun gets stronger and warmer as the album moves along, shining most brilliantly in the jaunty, joyous “Belly of June”, where Ringle’s characteristically spare vocals become fattened up with delicious harmonies as the music swells with strings and banjo. Things get positively hot in “Cascades” and “The Drought” before blossoming into the full-fledged pop Americana gem “Vernonia Blues”.
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Thistled Spring as a whole displays a rich progression – more textured and lush than the band’s previous two albums, it also captures the skillful interplay of the band’s current touring lineup of Ringle, violinist Nathan Crockett, cellist Catherine Odell, and multi-instrumentalist Sam Cooper. Lyrically Ringle continues to explore broken relationships, longing, and pain, but this album has an undercurrent of heat that translates to a thawing of frozen hearts, and music which rushes like spring torrents, all of which points to a resurgence of life after a hard winter. Horse Feathers’ first album, Words Are Dead, received a Plug Awards nomination for Americana Album of the Year in 2007, and their second, House With No Home, sold over 12,000 copies, making it one of Kill Rock Stars’ best-selling debut records ever. The band has spent the last few years touring, and their live shows are characterized by packed houses of silent, attentive crowds listening intently to every note and every empty space.
JOE PUG
For the moment, Joe Pug has it figured out, career if not life: Just write the songs that have to be written, play them for anybody who will listen, tour as if you had no home. Oh, and give your music away. Which isn’t to say he won’t be selling his debut full-length offering, Messenger (released February 16, 2010). But free is how he came to make it, more or less.
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It worked like this, for Joe Pug anyhow: The day before his senior year as a playwright student at the University of North Carolina, he sat down for a cup of coffee and had the clearest thought of his life: I am profoundly unhappy here. Then came the second clearest. Pug packed up his belongings and pointed his car towards Chicago. Working as a carpenter by day, the 23 year-old Pug spent nights playing the guitar he hadn’t picked up since his teenage years. Using ideas originally slated for a play he was writing called “Austin Fish,” Pug began creating the sublime lyrical arrangements that would become the Nation of Heat EP. The songs were recorded fast and fervently at a Chicago studio where a friend snuck him in to late night slots other musicians had canceled. He was short on money, but his bare-boned sincerity didn’t require much more than a microphone and it dripped off of each note he sang.
200 shows later, Pug finally took a brief respite to record his full-length debut. If Nation of Heat heralded the arrival of a talent to watch, Messenger assigns Pug a deserved spot among the finest songwriters of his generation. From the opening notes of the title track that leads off the record, it’s clear that the artist has no intention of retreating to the comfortable or the familiar. While the scathing war indictment “Bury Me Far (From My Uniform)” and the sparse, poetic “Unsophisticated Heart” illustrate that Pug is still a master of the guy-and-guitar song, it’s the supporting cast Pug brought on board that truly brings out the record’s subtle beauty. From the haunting, ethereal pedal steel guitar that sneaks delicately under “The Sharpest Crown” to the barrelhouse rhythm section that propels “The Door Is Always Open”, it’s clear that Pug is as comfortable exploring this new territory as he is solo. “The first record, it was a breeze,” he says. “Didn’t even know we were making it, just me and a guitar…the songs completely unadorned. This one, it’s like that thing where there’s an explosion and you realize how many options there are in the world.”
CLAIRE TAUBENHAUS
Claire Taubenhaus is a product of her vastly diverse upbringing. She spent the first half of her life in NYC, with intense influence from soul and Motown music. The next chunk of her life in rural Minnesota where she discovered folk music, and finally settling in Minneapolis where the thriving indie hip-hop scene influenced her greatly. Her music is a mutt. A product of all these musical genres and the diversity of cultures of all the places she has lived. A little bit soul, a little bit folk and a splash of hip-hop – Claire's music has a style all its own.
