American Hearts

Barstool Mountain is back up and running, with two posts already this week! Check it out, my friends.

We're a couple of hours away from Tom Waits tickets going on sale. Wish us luck. If we fail to procure our tix, you're gonna have to put with a bit of whining and begging in our next post (whenever that is).

Now that that's out of the way, I'd like to tug on yr coat a bit about another new record that we think is pretty darn swell. I know it's unusual for us to cover newer records in any extended capacity, and we'll return you to yr regularly scheduled "old-timey" stuff shortly. But with the positive reaction we got from the Hayes Carll post recently, we figgered y'all might be able to tolerate another new feller we think is pretty keen.

A.A. Bondy used to be in a grungy kinda band call Verbena which, frankly I never had much use for. So, imagine my surprise when I picked up Bondy's solo record, "American Hearts" and found a classic back porch record that reminds me, eerily, of Townes Van Zandt's early records.

The first thing you notice about the record is its intimacy. The recording is barely, production-wise, a step above Palace's "Days In The Wake", and you keep expecting to hear a passing car or crickets in the background. That's a good thing. Sure, it's filled with snare, piano/organ, and pedal steel, but done in such an understated way as to render the proceedings close. You are there, sitting on the steps to the porch, lit by fireflies, watching with wonder. It's an album rooted in an older, forgotten time.

Bondy's voice has a weariness, a whiskey and nicotine timbre, that pulls you in, invites you to stay the night and dance the slow waltz of the moonlight.

"There's A Reason" is a moment of pure beauty and loss...beauty in the heart of sadness. A lament of of hope and remembrance, a sepia-toned ode to the beating of the heart, a valedictory on the space between the possible and the dreamt.

Another "must-have" album this year, so far as we at the Mountain are concerned. Have I ever led you astray?

Enjoy. Mp3 files at the bottom.

And I gave my hand to the Fates
And they took me around
They showed me the Seven Wonders
The sights and the sounds

There was a man with cinders for eyes
There was a girl with a dress made of flies
And there's a reason
There's a reason

And it's love that's tearing them down
And it's love that turns them around
Say it is so

And the barroom is filled with the joy
Of making old friends
And jukebox girls trip the light
They wiggle and they bend

Blind Joe, he's feeling no pain
Sweet Georgia, she dreams of the rain
And there's a reason
There's a reason

And it's love that's tearing them down
And it's love that will turn them around
Say it is so

When the moon follows you where you go
And you cannot hide
And when voices of doom ring your ears
And horsemen do ride

May tomorrow the land be anew
May every bird sing unto you
That's the reason
That's the reason

That the love that's tearing you down
Is the love that will turn you around
That the love that's tearing you down
Is the love that will turn you around

Say it is so

A.A. Bondy: There's A Reason (mp3)

A.A. Bondy: Vice Rag (mp3)

A.A. Bondy: Rapture (Sweet Rapture) (mp3)

Please support your local, independent record stores. Fuck the Big Box stores.