(Rebel Records)
\You can't sing a depressing song while playing the banjo,"" Steve Martin famously quipped.
Americana and bluegrass never easily lent themselves to melancholy and depression, often preferring the safer territory of empathic solitude and heartbreak that passes. At just about every point on King Wilkie's album , it seems like the band is doing its best to prove Steve Martin right. Though rarely appearing to self-consciously make songs toward that end, Wilkie makes one attempt to prove the quote wrong.
It starts with an instrumental track, ""40 West."" The fiddle introduction sets a knee-slappin' tempo for the album before the banjo joins in. The song never slows nor indicates that it should. It's an enjoyable bit to get started, and shows the standout flaw of the production. ""40 West"" ends just when it seems like it's getting to the midpoint.
The rest of the album only takes up about 35 minutes. Admittedly those are 35 fine minutes, but King Wilkie could have given another couple of songs to make at least two-thirds of an hour. When a reprise of ""40 West"" appears as the last track, it ends suddenly, which is rather not the case for a band of pickers.
In the middle, singers Reid Burgess and Johnny McDonald provide the standard, earthy vocals bluegrass requires. They rarely get outside of a relaxed croon, mostly aiming to sound satisfying and natural. On ""Blue Yodel #7,"" a Jimmie Rodgers cover, they let loose a few high notes and apologize for it with some comfortably pitched harmonies on the following track, ""Goodbye So Long.""
With that song, King Wilkie tries to provide an argument to Martin. With lines like ""Goodbye so long, it's a sad, sad song / When you stand up and walk away,"" the song almost gets depressing. However, here the self-consciousness of the songwriter comes in. An almost-depressing song about being depressed will always fall just short of the adjective.
With ""Goodbye So Long,"" King Wilkie demonstrates its familiarity with the moods and images of its style. There are plenty of approaching trains, long roads and people on their own. The mood sometimes drifts to a sense of emptiness and longing yet always ends with acceptable closure. Though loneliness comes up all the time, it always passes with a mandolin solo a few seconds later.
""Drifting Away"" provides the best example. In an ""ocean of sorrow"" and with a ""last plea"" the narrator sings about his distance from his lost love. With the last words he is floating either to light or darkness and thoroughly understands both options.
??For the rest of the album, King Wilkie never drifts too far from traditional bluegrass and Americana music. Nick Reeb's fiddle and Abe Spear's banjo rule Broke, keeping the music safely within those boundaries. The great thing about the album is that it needs no experimentation to sustain it. Each song may seem somewhat similar to the others, but each proves that if it is , it doesn't need fixing.
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