David Nance & Mowed Sound

David Nance and Mowed Sound is the first album by the Nance group on Third Man Records but it arrives on the heels of over a decade of sprawling releases by the prolific Omaha songwriter. Songs like these don’t spring from the head of Zeus, after all. Picasso famously said, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal,” an admission that the only way you can hope to ever be original is to impersonate, chew up, distort and regurgitate without shame the things you love that came before. You can’t kill your idols until you catch up with them and you’ll never catch up with them if you don’t figure out how the hell they do what they do.

All of this is to say you’re listening to a rare artist who’s found his own voice through a voracious appetite for anything that rocks, anything that soothes and all the glorious static and disturbed transmissions in between. I’ve seen Dave wear a Chrome t-shirt until it practically fell off his body. I’ve also heard him sing a Bonnie Raitt song around a campfire that had everybody crying long before the smoke got in our eyes.

The Mowed Sound is the latest incarnation of the Nance project, a sympathetic crew of Omaha veteran co-conspirators. The core band on this album includes long-term members James Schroeder on guitars and keyboards and Kevin Donahue on drums and percussion. Local Omaha legend, Dereck Higgins, is responsible for the bass on all but one song here. New member, Sam Lipsett, plays bass on the closing track and Pearl Lovejoy Boyd provides haunting harmony on the album’s stunning duet, Tumbleweed.

The album breaks from the gate with Mock the Hours, a song that reminds us what a ferocious band the Nance group can be. Just as quickly as they raise our heart rates, however, the deeper, darker grooves which fortify the album begin to take root. This band has soul and it’s a delight to hear rhythm stealing the show in songs like Side Eyed Sam, Cut It Off, and Tergiversating. Listen for echoes of the great Bill Withers in Credit Line. The equally hypnotic Cure vs Disease sounds like it could have been recorded in Link Wray’s legendary 3-track shack a decade before Nance was born.

“The whole album is a big magic trick,” Nance says. And from the hypnotic pulse that permeates the songs to the incantatory lyrics sliding around the rhythms, it does feel like some kind of dark arts are at work. The guitars are never dispersed with, of course, but they are used more like scalpels from JJ Cale’s black bag than with the wild abandon found on previous albums. This inspired choice leaves space for some Faustian experimental electronics and noisy grit lurking within the rich humus of these songs to make us question our footing. “Most of these songs were written as country songs and then were perverted into different forms,” Nance confided, “but it sure as shit isn’t a country record.” As the songs draw to a close, the listener is treated to a cinematic masterstroke in the album’s tour de force, In Orlando. Featuring a heartburned narrator so bereft that the Florida sun itself feels like cruel and unusual punishment, it is, perhaps, Nance’s finest song to date and a colossal bummer so beautiful you can’t even be sore about how it casts a reverse shadow over all the songs that came before. In one gorgeous gesture, Nance manages to tip his hat to Neil Young’s Motion Pictures, pay off Warren Zevon’s famous motel bill, and leave his own name in the wet concrete between the hovering palm trees.

[Simon Joyner, Dec 2023]