Old time folk music filtered through a college radio mentality.

12 MP3 Songs
ROCK: Americana, FOLK: Traditional Folk



Details:
San Francisco's Last of the Blacksmiths began recording their first full-length in March 2004. Using a Tascam 388 (a 1980's era eight-channel mixing board-slash-1/4" reel-to-reel recorder, of which only seven channels worked), the band committed to tape-live-more than a dozen of the prettiest, soulful songs you ever did hear (or in your case, are about to). They spent the following months mixing and adding to the tunes with similarly-minded players like Jolie Holland and Matt Henry Cunitz. The result is really a masterpiece of an album.

- RH, Thrasher Magazine

I love the genuine sound of the vocals as he croons about, giving us this intimate portrayal of exactly what's going on in that noggin of his. Their sound is folk rock meets alt.country with lo-fi intentions but hi-fi results. While this may be their first full-length album it sounds like their twentieth due to the sheer mature sound that while typically dour in groove and lyrical content, somehow picks it up. This my friends, is the soundtrack to everything chilled and depressing in the world and it sounds beautiful. "Tree Song" is astonishing with the string arrangement propelling the song along the vacant highway of folk rock.

- J-Sin, smother.net

This self-titled debut album from San Francisco band Last of the Blacksmiths has all the makings of a serious altcountry-substance abuse problem. "Saloon Song" surges and subsides like a night at the local watering hole with your equally down-on-his-luck drinking buddy -- one minute, it's up, dancing along at a jaunty clip, the next it's slobbering over a sluggish organ melody. "Tree Song" stumbles around at a heroin-lethargic pace, teetering dangerously on the edge with lyrics like "Ran right out of your house/ Thinking, why should they die instead of me?" Lead singers Nathan Wanta's and Nigel Pavao's alternating voices trickle through each track like a morphine drip, sounding exhausted and slightly out-of-tune, numbing and blurring the melodies. There are moments of lighter-hearted sobriety ("Columbus Stockade Blues," a nice jam-band-y ramble through the rural territory of Carter Family harmonies and banjos, for example), but for the most part, the Blacksmiths wallow utterly in their enticing, near-lethal altcountry excess, and this is very much a good thing.

- Rachel Devitt, SF Weekly