The state of New Mexico is in the U.S. desert southwest, but it also straddles the Continental Divide. It has an entirely different landscape (and lifestyle) than you find in Texas to the east or Arizona to the west; it's high desert, hot in the summer but often quite cold in the winter. The music of Nels Andrews and his band, The El Paso Eyepatch, reflects that high, dry desert feeling in its spare, dry, lonesome sound and Andrews' spare, dry, lonesome lyrics. It's alternative country of a high order.
The album's title is Sunday Shoes, but the shoes in the cover photo, a pair of battered black wingtips, could be considered Sunday shoes only by someone very down on his luck. That's a pretty good description of the men and women who people this album, which also contains a good deal of imagery of boots, shoes and feet -- that part of the body that gets walked on all the time.
The instrumentation is gorgeously simple on Sunday Shoes. It consists mostly of acoustic guitar and banjo, with washes of electric guitar and pedal or lap steel, mostly courtesy of Jeffrey Richards, who has a fine touch on the strings. Michelle Collins provides sketchy harmonies, mostly on the choruses, behind Andrews' slightly raspy baritone. Bass and drums are supplied, when required, by Chris Kitchen and Heath Dauberman, respectively.
The opening track, "Central Ave. Romance," sets the slow, gloomy mood, with a dusty blues that verges on despair: "It's cold out here, and no one's got a light . . . I'm not talking about matches and fire . . . I want to know what you've got on the inside." The song ends with the protagonist deciding tonight he'll "leave this booze alone / stick my toes on the curb, try to flag down the moon." The next track, "Weight," (whose title, of course, calls to mind one of the more mythopoeic pieces in the American rock canon) evokes Harvest-era Neil Young, with a heart-rending refrain: "You can put your weight on me / but can you keep me home?" "Jesse's Mom" tells the story of a bi-racial child who's part of a traveling show and who feels like a circus freak himself. The Handsome Family's Brett Sparks, a recent arrival in New Mexico from Chicago, adds some minor-key accordion chords to this sad, lonely tale.
The emotional intensity gets ratcheted up a notch on "Broken Conversation," in which we hear just one side of a man's conversation with a telemarketer who evidently asked for the lady of the house, who has left the protagonist: "She don't live here no more / so stop what you're selling . . . " he says, and more besides. It's heart-breaking in the tradition of the best heart-breaking country songs. The next track, "Milk & Honey," deals with disaffection of another kind. As with most of Andrews' lyrics, these are impressionistic: "The river she's muddy, the banks they are dusty/that won't change my mind/I don't see no milk nor honey on either side" -- suggesting a story rather than telling it outright. Same with the beautiful poetic brush strokes of "Meadow Lake": "He looked and smelled like tea steeped for days/in a copper pot/he was bitter and strong." And I'm not sure what to make of a verse like this one in "Petal to a Bee," but I know it hits me right in the heart, and the gut: "All the rolling hills of evergreen/pull me like a petal to a bee/long women in short dresses/swaying in the summer breeze . . ." Same thing with the chorus of the final track, which features just a plucked banjo and acoustic guitar, and a chorus that's as lonely as the grave: "When the big oaks sway, let the wind blow/and the rain warp the boards on my front porch floor/and I'm just a leaf in the wind/and I can do no more."
Sunday Shoes isn't easy country music, with rhyming lyrics and soaring choruses and blazing electric guitars. But it goes places and illuminates emotions that that other type of song can never touch. Andrews' characters evoke Cormac McCarthy's emotionally gutshot men and women, and his spare, poetic lyrics just might stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the likes of Tom Waits and Townes Van Zandt . . . time will tell.
