The plaintive whine of Southern lap steel, steady, big boom of bass, and deep, unfiltered voice of leading lady Patty LeMay, bring all the charm of a satirical set of muses to the first offering of Spiritual Family Reunion, Goodbye Ceremony.
It’s a mix of indie rock sensibilities, dressed up in southern soul, blues and gospel. This is the best thing I’ve heard all year.
LeMay sings like a disenchanted, modern-day Patsy Cline. I would compare this album to what the best, and bravest, in the broadening Southern music category are doing these days.
The songs sound more like long, slow tracks of Neko Case, but LaMay signs like Amy Lavere, brazenly ignoring the fashion of auto tuning, preserving the true emotions of the stories in Spiritual Family Reunion’s songs. Take the tuned-up smoothness out of Cat Power’s The Greatest, and you might be getting closer.
It’s a hard sound to pin-point.
LeMay is joined by a prolific cast of musicians, hailing from bands like the Silver Jews and Calixio, to name a few. The sensibilities of their pasts shine through. This isn’t country. It isn’t mainstream. It is beautiful, and complicated, and best when listened to with the volume turned up.
At first I thought the songs sounded too much like each other. Obviously, these folks had stumbled onto a beautiful way to tell stories, in the long-form country music standard of pedal steel, piano and walking bass, dashed up with satirical lyrics. But could the sound sustain the album?
It finally clicked when comparing the original and the reprise of “Sparkle Across The Water,” a song that clearly sounds like mid-’90s PJ Harvey, and is later reprised in a more Southern fashion.
“Shane” is a bar song for a new generation; “The Jesus Piano” would be a gospel tune, if it wasn’t so deliciously sacrilegious; and “All You Ever Do (Is Hurt Me)” will be my go-to song for troubled romance from now on.
Goodbye Ceremony was five years in the making and finally released in late March. Additional recordings are scattered across LaMay’s hometown of Nashville, and I can’t wait to see the group?LeMay, Mason Vickery, Ben Smythe, Caitlin Rose, Levon Emmons, William Tyler and Steve Poulton?do this live.
