Wooden Wand & the Briarwood Virgins produced a terrifically unexpected record back in 2011 titled Briarwood, and the LP Blood Oaths of the New Blues provides the follow up to its success. While considerably lesser in its sonic rewards, the new album is also quite different in its ambitions and it should ultimately prove a keeper for those attentive to this very interesting contemporary artist/outfit.
Wooden Wand is the performance moniker of singer-songwriter/guitarist James Jackson Toth, a highly prolific gent who first made a name for himself in collaboration with the group Vanishing Voice. With the 2005 release of Harem of the Sundrum & the Witness Figg for the 5 Rue Christine label he emerged under the Wooden Wand name alone for the first time, offering up a folky extension of his sensibility that contrasted very well with the far more bent psychedelic aura of the prior material he’d accumulated with Vanishing Voice.
The sum of all that work placed Toth very much at the forefront of the freak-folk scene, a movement that hit it’s apex in the guts of the last decade and included artists as diverse as Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, Josephine Foster, and Animal Collective. At its best it was a pretty robust happening, and at its lesser moments it could simply seem a bit inferior to the late-‘60s/early-‘70s music it was plumbing for inspiration.
Describing freak-folk (or its overlapping scene designator New Weird America) in the past tense might seem a little unkind, but that’s not the intention; while the biggest names associated with the form are still very much extant, the movement as a whole seems to have essentially drifted off the radar screen.
While it’s been less than a decade since the ballyhoo of freak-folk was at its heaviest, a fervor that produced far too many often limited edition releases that hit the shelves of shops and the websites of online retailers to seemingly multiply with the blink of an avaricious eye, it still feels like a long time ago.
On records like The Flood, Wooden Wand and Vanishing Voice occasionally indulged in extended tracks that floated around on the outskirts of the freak-folk experience in a manner not unlike the bent tribal free-psyche of No-Neck Blues Band, coming up with an appealingly eerie sort of dropout vibe that helped set them apart from the psychedelic music of a few decades hence. But even amongst those outsider excursions, there were moments of songwriting clarity from Toth that pointed to his eventual direction as an accessible tunesmith.
As stated above, the Vanishing Voice-less Harem of the Sundrum & the Witness Figg marked a significant development in Toth’s artistic direction, and the growth continued with ‘09’s Born Bad and a pair of releases in ’10, Wither Thou Goest, Cretin and Death Seat, the latter issued on head Swan Michael Gira’s Young God label.
Those records, particularly Death Seat, marked a shift in Toth’s work from the folky to a somewhat outlaw-county oriented outpost that placed him in the company of Silver Jews’ David Berman and Will Oldham, sharing with the latter a level of prolificacy that’s helped him to remain relevant as the freak-folk scene that spawned him has faded from the forefront of the musical conversation.
But 2011’s Briarwood, credited to Wooden Wand & the Briarwood Virgins, is the record that marked the biggest change in Toth’s career thus far, though in retrospect it was a move that shouldn’t be considered all that surprising. For instance, while his plentiful discography (something like 100 releases, and that was a couple years ago) has made it essentially impossible for specific listeners to get a handle on his complete output, he’s always possessed a high level of quality control, at least across the dozen or so releases that have crossed this writer’s ear.
The extroverted raucousness of Briarwood was on more than one occasion compared to Crazy Horse, but in my estimation that association was a bit overstated. One aspect of the connection that did feel right however concerned how the record differed quite markedly from the general thrust of his prior material, both with Vanishing Voice or in “solo” mode. Previous to Briarwood, Toth’s musical essence was pretty immediately identifiable as being in the indie/u-ground tradition.
But with his 2011 LP, Toth made a record that registered almost entirely as if the musical affairs of the last twenty-five or so years hadn’t actually happened. It wasn’t post- anything, and it certainly didn’t connect as retro in intent. Surely there are other bands that have mined a similar attitude, one uncluttered with touches of contemporary sophistication and also devoid of the aura of throwback, all whilst rocking up a storm, but Briarwood still sounded pretty special; it was a truly superb collection of nine songs fleshed out to just short of forty minutes in length (very mid-‘70s) and across that running time it flaunted a natural sense of dynamics (and a diversity of instrumentation) that helped it to reside as a cut above the norm.
And it was surely going to prove a hard act to follow. Blood Oaths of the New Blues is that follow up, retaining the same band as Briarwood, and while it ultimately reveals itself as being the product of the same group of individuals, what it offers is quickly identifiable as a much different record. In a nutshell; where the former is often stomping album that’s best played loud, this new one is far less aggressive in its intentions. In fact, the instrumental opening of the nearly twelve minute first track “No Bed for Beatle Wand/Days This Long” actually brought the music of Low briefly to mind.
In no way should that be inferred as a bad thing. And when Toth’s vocals enter the picture they bring a shade of soulfulness that ends up in a territory not at all far from that of Kurt Wagner or Vic Chesnutt (the latter especially on the song’s second, shorter portion), except that Toth is smoother in his inflections. And if Toth’s voice becomes the center of attention, it doesn’t mean the music, which includes some exceptionally pretty vibes, a nicely droning harmonium and a very classy electric piano, falls by the wayside.
The narrative of following cut “Outsider Blues” details Toth and a woman named Christie lighting out for a blues festival, and the lyrics at the beginning are truly bonus; “Once we got out of town/I put on some Mississippi Fred McDowell/Christie said, ‘don’t you think we’ll be hearing enough blues this weekend?’/so I played Sticky Fingers and I sang along to each word of each song”.
In its unconventionality, it’s somewhat comparable to Bill Callahan, but again Toth is a smoother and more relaxed vocalist. Surrounding him is a light, chiming strum that mingles with some lazy hand drums and as the song progresses a soloing electric possessing just a hint of psychedelia.
The frustratingly brief “Dome Community People (Are Good People)” increases the psychedelic aspects, but “Dungeon of Irons” shifts gears, sorta coming off like a stripped down demo of an unreleased Briarwood song, particularly due to the shared vocals of Janet Simpson, a recurring motif both here and on the prior LP. But the recurring ingredient of harmonium helps to integrate the song into Blood Oaths’ sonic palate.
The second side opens with “Supermoon (The Sounding Line),” and with its accents of pedal steel, it’s the most explicitly country moment on the record up to this point, though it sounds quite distinct from the outlaw troubadour direction of his solo stuff from a few years back. Also of note on the track are Simpson’s vocals, sounding simply superb.
In contrast, “Southern Colorado Song” explores a somewhat knotty rock vibe, though through sheer length (the song is over six minutes long) it does locate a sort of groove, though again it’s one that’s noticeably different from the boldness Briarwood. “Jhonn Balance” reveals Toth at his most soulful as the band engages in an almost drone-shuffle (not as difficult as that might sound when you employ the harmonium) beneath him. The brief “No Debts” finds the band reduced to just Toth and acoustic guitar for a solid if unremarkable closer.
While Blood Oaths of the New Blues never returns to the opening high point of “No Bed for Beatle Wand/Days This Long,” it does possess a strong consistency across its subsequent tracks, and in that evenness the record finds its success. Where Briarwood was shrewdly modulated as a social record (and one that was extremely well suited for driving), Blood Oaths of the New Blues is far better described as solitary listening.
If it falls short of being a great record it still feels like a very well thought out next step. It might end up as a minor entry in the body of work of James Jackson Toth, but in an oeuvre as sizable as his, that’s nothing to be ashamed of.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B
