Aug. 08, 2012 - Issue #877: Corb Your Enthusiasm
Carry Me Back
Old Crow Medicine Show {recordings_bands_mg} Carry Me Back {/recordings_bands_mg}
ATO,
3
Every Old Crow Medicine Show album is a time warp back to the heyday of Americana. Every song could be some long-underearthed field recording of some lost and forgotten yet brilliant '30s band (somehow recorded with a very modern crispness). So the band play fiddles and strings and sings harmonies, and on Carry me Back, the band's hiatus-breaking release, drop lines like "gonna hunt you like a rabbit on a Mississippi Saturday night." Plenty of other bands ride a similar rail. But the most important element of revivalist music like this always seems present with Old Crow: it feels honest, and lively. You'd be hard pressed to find a more genuine take on the style of songwriting being made in the modern era that comes off as an enlivened record rather than a dusty relic.So if Carry Me Back simply harvests a new crop of what OCMD always do, with a lively furl, well, few will complain about gorgeously simple ballads like "Ain't It Enough" or fiddle and banjo-led tracks like "We Don't Grow Tobacco." Even the album's weaknesses—the ultimately limited sonic palette, a couple of thinner numbers like "Country Gal"—seem to simply prove the band's adherence to honesty. Commendable, sure, but listenable too.
vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus
Privacy Policy:
Vue respects your privacy. We will not forward your personal information to any other organization except as required by law, and will use your e-mail address only to respond to your comments. We reserve the right to edit and remove comments for length, clarity and/or if they are illegal or inappropriate. Your email address is never shown to visitors to vueweekly.com. Read the whole policy at: http://vueweekly.com/privacy
Comments policy
Comments go online directly without first being seen or reviewed by editors at Vue. Don't personally attack people, don't be defamatory, don't be spam-atory, don't hawk your band, don't pretend to be someone else, be clear, be on topic, be nice. Read our extended comments policy here. »
We use Disqus for our comments system. What's that all about?
We found that managing the comment community at Vue was easier to do with a system like Disqus. If this isn't straightforward to you, get help here.