Pinetop Seven: Bringing Home The Last Great Strike

Pinetop Seven's 1998 album Rigging The Toplights was one of the most beautiful and adventurous releases from the latest generation of alternative-country acts. But "country" doesn't always accurately describe the band's music, though, whatever its sound, the word "alternative" surely does apply. The group combines the twang of Americana with cinematic soundscapes and the odd instrumentation of such iconoclastic composers as Harry Partch to create a potent aural soup of ethnic music, traditional melodies, and avant-garde execution. Bringing Home The Last Great Strike, Pinetop Seven's third full-length, has a lot in common with its predecessor. Once again recorded in the band's attic rehearsal space, the disc is full of haunted-house percussion and creaky sound effects, as well as banjos and guitars, seemingly conflicting details that only enhance its uniqueness. Balancing stretches of instrumental resourcefulness and more straight-ahead balladry, Strike hinges on the interplay between the foreign (the disc tackles music from Eastern Europe to Southeast Asia, and from tangos to waltzes) and the familiar, each element bolstering the other. The glue that holds it together is the absolutely riveting and heartbreaking songwriting of Darren Richard, who, with the departure of musical partner Charles Kim, remains Pinetop Seven's key creative force. His singing eerily similar to Son Volt's Jay Farrar, Richard has a much darker vision, more akin to Tom Waits even as his voice, soaring with sorrow, gracefully hits all those high notes. "On The Last Ride In," "A Black Eye To Be Proud Of," "Ten Thousand To Carlisle Came," "Mission District," "November 4 a.m.," and, well, the rest are all magical evocations of a mysterious time and place, hidden narratives that twist and turn through the tricky song structures. If there's a downside to any of this remarkable music, it's that you might want to start the album over again before it's finished, and it's hard to complain about that.