(2023) Cian Nugent - She Brings Me Back to the Land of the Living
Review:
Cian Nugent first caught our ears as a Takoma-style fingerpicker, one of the younger players on the third Imaginational Anthem compilation, alongside Mark Fosson and Stephen Basho-Junghans. His Doubles, in 2011, followed a similar path, offering two side-long solo acoustic compositions in the style of Jack Rose’s transcendental blues raga. But like Steve Gunn, Nugent has refused to be boxed into the sometimes musty and archival pre-war blues category. He got his teenage kicks out a couple of years ago with the rollicking power pop outfit, The Number Ones, carrying on a ragged romantic tradition of bands like the Undertones. Now, with She Brings Me Back to the Land of the Living, he ventures into song-structured country folk rock, a la Zachary Cale, Red River Dialect and that Gunn fellow we just mentioned. Nugent wrote these songs while caring for his mother after she suffered a stroke (she painted the cover image while recovering in the hospital), and while they don’t overtly focus on illness and mortality, they have a ruminative, inward-looking bent. Consider, for instance, the lovely “Sound of the Rain,” taking shape out of shadows and wavering tones of pedal steel (that’s Dan Lead who plays with Norah Jones and Cass McCombs, among others). Nugent’s delivery is unhurried and without drama, as he evokes the late-light drift and reverie. “Sitting here with the window open, I can feel the rain coming in,” he sings with a worn-in nonchalance. “The lamplight unbroken like some cigarette skin, cast out into a wind to melt away, I’m hearing the sound of the rain again.” The band is really rather good, including not just Lead but Nugent’s co-producer and drummer Sean Carpio, Garvan Gallagher (once a young Nugent’s music teacher) on bass and the viola player Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh. Irish jazz icon Greg Felton plays the piano and the Zelig-like percussionist Ryan Jewell turns up for a track as well. The arrangements are subtle and unshowy, whether in the loping, open-ended “High in an Airplane” (which reminds me a lot of Steve Gunn’s Eyes on the Lines material) or the pensive syncopations of “Pass the Time Away” (where I’m hearing a bit of Ryley Walker’s song-based style). That latter song continues in “How the Time Passes,” an atmospheric instrumental which carries on where the verse gives out with blues-tinged riffs and antic rhythm and a mad swirl of Irish fiddle. It’s a reminder that, while Nugent may dip into verse chorus structures when it suits him, he’s never going to be bound by them, and it is a fitting climax to this moody, gorgeous album. — dustedmagazine
Track List:
01 - Empress
02 - The Sound of Rain
03 - High Up Airplane
04 - Siamese Sharks
05 - I've Been Down
06 - Dogs in the Morning
07 - Pass the Time Away
08 - How the Time Passes
Media Report:
Genre: folk-rock, psychedelic rock
Country: Ireland
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)
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