Cordelia's Dad is an indie-rock band, punk if you will, whose members have an ongoing love affair with really old-time American music. Throughout the 1990s they produced a series of albums that swung from punk to acoustic old-time and unaccompanied shape-note songs. On a hiatus that has extended since around the turn of the millennium, their most recent release is What it is, a pastiche of tracks from three different sessions with two different producers, in 1997 and 1999.
This release leans more heavily on Cordelia's Dad's rock proclivities, although everything they do has a folk sensibility in that the words are at least as important as the music. This incarnation of the group is a trio, with Cath Oss on bass guitar and accordion (she plays fiddle on their folkier outings), Peter Irvine on drums and percussion, and frontman Tim Eriksen on guitar and other instruments. Although all contribute vocals, Eriksen most often takes the lead, and his voice is practically another instrument in itself, a slightly nasal mid-range voice that sounds craggy and lived-in, and that has been shaped into a powerful vessel by years of shape-note singing.
Most of the tracks on What it Is tend toward mid-tempo arrangements or slower. It opens with two rockers: "Camille's Not Afraid of the Barn," a dark coming-of-age tale rife with images that haunt adolescent nightmares, highlighted by Oss's rumbling bass and Eriksen's deadpan vocals; and "Upswing," a bit of lurching, crunchy power-pop. "Inhale," which follows, is an intriguing mix of alt-rock and jazz, courtesy of Eriksen's colorful contributions on trombone or euphonium; its outro is an eerie section of a softly sung hymn in three-part harmony.
On "Eyelovemusic," which is a wordplay on Eriksen's own motto, he sings the slow, melancholy song with almost cantor-style droning vocals, at times deliberately off-key. "Five Way Flashlight" is full of bizarre sounds, including non-verbal humming and more of that trombone, ranging from deep croaks to high screams. What to call this one? Avant-rock? Prog-folk?
"Little Speckled Egg" is a lurching uptempo rocker with verses in four-four and Eriksen's and Oss's call-and-response chorus in seven-four. This one breaks into an a capella vocal duet at the end, which perfectly leads into the next track, an unaccompanied old-time American prisoner's lament called "Despair." Next, Oss sings a deconstructed version of "If I Had a Hammer," this one titled just "Hammer" and featuring just one or two words from each verse over a subdued but insistent backing of strummed chords and clanging, bright-edged noises. The effect is almost like machine music and minimalist poetry, quite startling and effective.
Rounding out the second half of the album are mid-tempo rockers "Rock Me (to Sleep)," "Leave Your Light On," and "Song of the Heads;" "Brother Judson," a folk-rock song in seven-eight time that would sound equally at home on albums by early Fairport Convention or Nirvana; a slightly rocked-up treatment of the traditional "Dark and Rolling Eye," in which the protagonist gets a disease from a preacher's daughter; and the shape-note hymn, "Brethren Sing."
The more abrasive rock moments -- like the squalling guitar solo in "Rock Me" and the crunchy alt-rock waves of sound in the choruses of "Brother Judson," which has the stamp of producer Butch Vig all over it -- tend to dominate the impression this album leaves. But it's the slower, quieter moments and the dark pensiveness of nearly all the lyrics that reward the tenacious listener.
