Categories : Country + Western, Music Reviews.
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Rating: 3.5/5 Released: October 4, 2005 Reviewer: Nathan Atnikov |
Elliott Brood’s new LP, Ambassador, is a dark jaunt through an unspoken community of country music. Fuelled by lap steel and banjo, the album is all at once dark, mysterious, sincere, and oddly affecting. Brood is a three person band – not the name of a solo artist – driven by Casey Laforet, Steve Pitkin, and Mark Sasso. These gentlemen bring to the table what feels like a brand new country music experience. Hazy vocals are pushed way down in the mix on most songs, which gives the album an unusual prioritization of rhythm over lyrics. Instrumentally, the album is more than up to the task.
The first half of the record is all done in a Tom Waits-ish style, where vocals are more like another instrument than a vehicle for the text itself. The thudding, banjo-driven President (35) is one part country hoedown, one part intense bender, while Acer Negundo is a slower, sinister, threatening song. In the second half the album changes pace, led by the one-two punch of Jackson and Johnny Rooke. Both songs feature guitar over banjo, and the vocals are more prominent – in other words, they seem more like alt-country pieces that you’d expect.
While Ambassador feels a bit like two albums stuck together, it is still an intense journey from start to finish. Elliott Brood evokes a lot of emotion with a relatively minimalist approach. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but is certainly worth a listen.
