The notion that music filed under the moniker of “country” can inhabit spaces beyond its core audience, or slip right out of any genre-hold and instead commune with the infinite, can be defended repeatedly. A quick listen to Freddie Hart’s mournfully ecstatic “Blue”, the interplanetary exotica of Speedy West’s “Rippling Waters”, or the wistful harmonies on the Davis Sisters’ “Sorrow and Pain” reveals music as ghostly as it is grounded. Beginning in the 1960s, experimentalist Henry Flynt more consciously but no less effectively tugged the genre into the realm of minimalism, creating double-tracked fiddle ragas, ping-ponging steel guitar stoner drones, and mad, line dance rhythms for raving lunatics.
All the above and much more show pedal steel virtuoso Barry Walker Jr. in some fine past company, as he delivers albums featuring slowly building crescendos of fried psych, music that exists somewhere between alternative country and indie, or records that simply split the heavens into shards. Certainly, there’s a kinship with the late Susan Alcorn; they both have a grounding in more earthly pedal steel forms. Yet, Walker’s continuing connection to the instrument’s 20th-century American roots is much more apparent.
His record, Paleo Sol, plays blissfully with this rootedness. Here, with only Rob Smith’s drums and Jason Wilmon’s bass, Walker simply floats. “A Trip into Town” is delicate, as his instrument shimmers before cloaking itself in echo, and then morphing from a drone into some new shape. It’s the sound of a chrysalis. Album opener “Quiessence” (sic) is appropriately titled, as it finds the trio stretching, as if waking up, yet still and silent, contemplating where their music might go. Once they land, as they do in “Leaving Lower Big Basin”, Walker’s own acoustic guitar strums, emphatic as they are unhurried, nudge tender waves of bluesy, pedal steel swoops.
Ultimately, these are tracks based on drift, as if the group set up instruments in a field and allowed a gentle but persistent breeze to strike them. The results are at once somber and celebratory; they sound like a constant soundtrack to discovery, rebirth, or a hard-won peace. While 2018’s solo effort, Diaspora Urkontinent, comes close to Barry Walker Jr.’s Paleo Sol’s serenity, this latest release hovers closer to earth, where it extracts the trance-like possibilities from country’s mid-20th century past and lets the sounds roam, using just enough of a tether to keep them from wandering off altogether.