eastmountainsouth: self-titled

Sometimes an artist’s background is ripe with quirky anecdotes; the sort of thing that makes for a fun transition between the bio and the actual music encoded on the little round plastic disc. Other times, however, that background can be such significant part of the artist’s fabric that it informs every lyric and every note. Such is the case with eastmountainsouth, whose self-titled debut is a stark and beautiful record that combines the dark gothic sounds of the deep South with the hill country melodies of Appalachia.

The core of the group is Kat Maslich, who grew up in bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley’s home on Clinch Mountain, and Peter Adams, an Alabama native who grew up in a family of self-described “harmony junkies.” The duo, through their own unique and separate journeys, ended up in Los Angeles, unhappy with where their respective music careers were taking them. Maslich was about to move back to Virginia and Adams, who had a B.A. and M.A. in music theory, was harboring serious doubts about his future in academic music while studying film scoring at USC.

While auditioning singers for a TV spot in the spring of 1999, Adams came across Maslich. Her lonesome voice caught his attention immediately. She didn’t get the job but a few months later Adams called her up out of the blue and asked her to sing on a demo song he was about to pitch to Nashville. As they compared backgrounds and their own songs, the connection was obvious. The result is eastmountainsouth, a record that not only embodies that almost mystical connection but reflects their combined background with a murky and haunting yet absolutely gorgeous sound.

The opener, “Hard Times”, shows off the two at their best. Their voices dance and twist around one another like two lonely spirits that have finally found their match. The harmonies on eastmountainsouth make the record, but its joys, revealed slowly with each spin, don’t stop there. As “Hard Times” demonstrates, this is the best kind of southern Gothic opera. A record that traces the roots and experience of loss like the old-time dark bluegrass records of Appalachian lore, yet somehow keeps a modern edge.

Set like the film scores Adams was studying in California, the flow of the record is remarkable. “Hard Times” gives way to the slightly more upbeat, banjo-infused “Winter”, a song with a strong literary sense that showcases Maslich’s lonesome, nasaly vocals. If “Hard Times” was the opening shot of the movie that is eastmountainsouth, a scene that comes right for you out of the dark, then “Winter” is the opening credits, rolling over a mountainous sonic landscape, full of peaks and valleys. The spiritual “Ghost” brings us back into the immediacy of the two characters we met in the opening scene and ties them together with a natural spirituality that equally evokes its surroundings; dark and lush massifs of loss and hope. Maslich’s voice floats over the geography like a quiet, thin layer of mist. The instrumental “Interlude”, which sounds like a fiddle-heavy Appalachian orchestra warming up in the pit, links “Ghost” with “You Dance”, where Adams takes the vocal reigns in a piano-pecked ode to hope and love.

While not all that ambitious on the surface in terms of the individual songs’ themes or arrangements, the way Adams links the songs like a film score, or the German piano compositions he studied as a graduate student, is risky. But the payoff comes upon repeated listens as the links between each song becomes clear, so much so that you can’t imagine arranging the album any differently for the fear of losing the magic. Songs like “So Are You to Me” aren’t impressive standing alone. Yet juxtaposed with the song that follows, “Show Me the River”, it seems essential.

And like a lot of southern artists, the vision here is tied to the natural world. On “Rain Comes Down”, everything from the piano to the percussion to the finger picking on guitar is tied to the feeling of a slow, gentle rain. “Still Running” and “All the Stars”, as the titles might suggest, are both lyrically and musically reliant on the earth and the sky. The fact that they sit next to each other on the record is no mistake. “On Your Way”, the closing track on the record, is no accident either. A slow burning celebration of emerging from the ashes of loss with a kind of reconciled understanding, the song is a fitting denouement.

This is a record likely to be lost in the shuffle of new releases; one that won’t find an easy category to be filed away in at your local record store. The mix of contemporary arrangement and scoring with the raw sound of lost musical roots makes for a dense first listen. The experimentation, including the fusion of traditional instruments like banjo and fiddle with looping percussion, is deceptive. But if you give eastmountainstouth an opportunity to win you over with its rich and complex composition and harrowing rural harmonies, odds are you will find the experience a rewarding one.