[folk-rock, indie-rock, psychedelic rock] (2019) Sparrow Steeple ...

(2019) Sparrow Steeple - Tin Top Sorcerer

Review:
Sparrow Steeple was born out of Strapping Fieldhands, a band that in its 1990s heyday merged the hippy folk world music aspiration of the Incredible String Band with the idiot savant pop fuzziness of Guided by Voices and the Thinking Fellers Union Local 282. The band shares members — Jeff Werner, Jacy Webster and Bob Dickie — with the lately revived Strapping Fieldhands, as well as a certain wild-eyed, magic-folk-through-burnt-amps aura. The wispy voiced and whimsical singer is Barry Goldberg, a visual artist of some repute in the band’s home town of Philadelphia. Tin Top Sorcerer is Sparrow Steeple’s third full-length, following 2005’s Rangefinder and 2017’s Steeple Two , and it seems, after a quick run through the Bandcamp back catalogue a bit more gleefully overstuffed and amplified than previous material. “Roll Baby,” the opener blows out the honkytonk blues with guitars distorted into fuzzy bludgeons and a harmonica (played by Philadelphia regular Harmonica Dan Balcer) blared to shreds. A hornet’s nest of conflicting ideas buzzes around the block simple chorus “roll baby, roll baby, roll,” in a machine-age roil of feedback and dissonance. It is far less pastoral and folky than cuts like “Hamlet Egg Sandwich,” though just as bug-eyed eccentric. Sparrow Steeple is either sending up or wholly committed to late 1960s hobbit-y folk metal mythology, imagining wizards at war in the backwards-guitar woozy “Stabbing Wizards” and retelling the “Elves and the Shoemaker” story in “Leprechaun Gold.” This latter is a wild, wiggy ride through wah wah’d guitar licks and arch, Donovan-ish trilled vocals, its round-the-maypole melody subsumed in psychedelic distortion. Think, for comparison, of the Bevis Frond at his folkiest, then think of him on a lot of acid. Even relatively modern references come dipped in a folkloric coating, as in “The Wolfman of Mayberry,” where Sparrow Steeple conflates the lycanthropic legend with The Andy Griffith Show. Isobel Sollenberger of Bardo Pond makes a guest appearance on this cut, blowing wild flourishes of psychedelic flute and echoing Goldberg’s equally out-there vocal flights of fancy. “Gomer’s acting strange…Goober’s actually deranged…Floyd the barber’s insane,” they sing in loose call and response, and indeed, there is something not quite right in Mayberry. Tin Top Sorcerer rides a rambunctious energy that, in general, overcomes a tendency towards preciousness. It’s busy and noisy and full of a momentum that makes you forget that these are grown men singing about fairy tales and shoehorning exotic instruments (Hulusi, bouzouki) into folk melodies. Think about it too long and it might seem silly, but fortunately, there’s not much time or space for contemplation.

Tracklist:
01 - Roll Baby
02 - Leprechaun Gold
03 - Stabbing Wizards
04 - Wolfman of Mayberry
05 - Your Mom’s Twin Sister’s Daughter’s Twisted
06 - Duchess of Eden
07 - Handy Andean Indian
08 - Waterboarded By the Lord
09 - Girl in the Whispering Wood

Summary:
Country: USA
Genre: folk-rock, indie-rock, psychedelic rock


Media Report:
Source: CD
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Bit rate: ~ 796-932 Kbps
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits