WINGDALE COMMUNITY SINGERS
Night, Sleep, Death
Drag City

www.dragcity.com
 

Apparently, it was a shared love of old-time music that initially brought the Wingdale Community Singers together over a decade ago. It can be hard to tell that from their 3rd album Night, Sleep Death, released mid-winter of this year, but the hints at it are glorious: the meditatively bowed outro to “White Bike;” the spectacularly contemplative secular hymn “Ole Rudy.”

The rest of the album, however, is perhaps more difficult than necessary. Some quirkiness can be expected from a Drag City folk album, but much of this lacks the charisma of Will Oldham or fluid neo-traditionalism of Alasdair Roberts. Instead it largely runs toward a variety of hyphenated folk subgenres, prominently late ’80s anti-, and pre-Mumford early ’00s indie-. Lyrically the bulk of the record feels like a mishmash of poetic aspiration (one group member is an author, and a Walt Whitman piece provides a lyrical touchstone), irony, and stream-of-consciousness faux-intimate banality. By my count, the opening track concludes with the phrase ‘So What?’ chanted a capella 23 times, stretched well over a minute, in multi-part harmony, that left me asking the same question of the band.

Musically, it’s frequently an intriguing album. While none of the singers are particularly strong soloists, they achieve wonderful harmonies throughout, and those harmonies can carry some of the weaker songs. Instrumentation is sparse, consistently effective, and occasionally a little noisy. Progressions and solos alike contain many surprising twists and turns; it’s no surprise that the lead guitarist is David Grubbs, of post-rock heroes Gastr Del Sol.

Night, Sleep, Death is certainly not without its high points. “Passing Stranger,” coming right off that beautiful “White Bike” outro, is a stunner, reminiscent of the Roches if they’d been around in 1968 and backed by Pentangle. And “A Sweeter Way To Say Goodbye,” the album’s closer and seemingly most sincere effort, is one of those songs that would be an equally effective heartbreaker in country or soul. In the plaintive setting they provide here, as the album’s bittersweet closer, it works as a metaphor for the listening experience the album provides.

— Dan Greenwood