Cast King
Saw Mill Man
(Locust Media)
If fate had dealt Cast King another hand, he
might be as famous as the late Johnny Cash. Like his more
celebrated contemporary, King toured extensively in the late
’40s and early ’50s and even cut some tracks with Sam
Phillips at the legendary Sun Studios. But when his backing band,
the Country Drifters, broke up, King relinquished his dreams of
stardom and confined himself to an audience of family members and
friends in his native Old Sand Mountain, Ala. He continued to write
songs, however — according to his press kit, he’s
accumulated about 500 in the past 65 years — and now, thanks
to the help of guitarist and field-recording enthusiast Matt
Downer, he has finally released his debut album, Saw Mill Man.
King will turn 80 next month, and you can
hear his age in every phlegmy syllable and quaint locution. His
shaky baritone has the spit-soaked sibilance that bespeaks several
missing teeth, but it’s surprisingly resonant, with the
gritty plangency of Hank Williams and the grave-ready gravitas of
Cash in his later, Rick Rubin-produced years. Downer, using a
four-track cassette deck and a minidisc player, recorded the
album’s dozen tracks in a tin-roofed shack near King’s
house and wisely kept the production frills to a minimum. A few
basic electric-guitar licks and, on one song, a simple drum pattern
are all that accompanies King’s vocals and acoustic guitar.
The austere arrangements put the spotlight where it belongs: on his
ruthlessly bleak country-folk compositions. The songs traffic in the usual topics —
inconstant women, booze, drudgery, hardship, and death — and
many of the melodies will sound suspiciously familiar to anyone
with a cursory knowledge of the country-music canon, but such
quibbles are misplaced. Where country is concerned, authenticity
trumps originality every time. When King laments the hard-luck life of the laborer
(“Saw Mill Man”) or the various privations of the committed
drunk (“Wino” and “Numb”), he sounds like a man
who speaks from experience. This quality of grim endurance imbues every
track, culminating in the murder ballad “Under the Snow”:
“They’ll put the hood on me, they’ll cut off my
hair/They’ll execute me and give me the chair.”
Paula Frazer
Leave the Sad Things Behind
(Birdman)
On Leave the Sad
Things Behind, her third solo release,
Paula Frazer proves herself one of the finest singer/songwriters in
the nebulous alt-country genre; whether anyone will notice,
however, remains to be seen. Although the former Tarnation
frontwoman has been recording under her own name since 2001, she
doesn’t get a fraction of the press that’s lavished on
many of her less-gifted peers. It’s too bad, because Frazer
not only has a magnificent voice, with the delicate resilience of a
young Emmylou Harris and the throaty soulfulness of Patsy Cline,
but she also displays a real knack for combining her influences in
extraordinary ways. Piano and pedal-steel turn the midtempo ballad
“Always on My Mind” into a fitting showcase for her
backwoods yodel, whereas “Watercolor Lines,” with its
south-of-the-border pizzicato guitar and high-drama strings, pays
homage to Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti-Western soundtracks.
Sassy horns, radiant harmonies, and reverb-kissed guitars make
“No Other” seem like a long-lost collaboration between
Love and the Mamas and the Papas, and the throwback organ hook and
background ba-da-bas of “Funny Things” impart a similar
’60s-rock spirit. Fortunately, though, Frazer knows better
than to leave the sad things entirely behind, as the title track paradoxically
demonstrates. When Frazer sings, “You’ve been hurt, you
said all that before/The crying’s all over now,” the
ache in her voice belies the severity of her words.
This article appears in Jan 5-11, 2006.
