photo by michael persico
From a warehouse in Kensington comes the old-fashioned bluegrass glory of Wes Mattheu & the New Way Down, a ramshackle troupe based around the emotionally acute songwriting and charismatic voice of its fearless leader. The band's been evolving for a decade now, and on the bushy-tailed new album Finding a New Way ... the Old Way, the whole damn thing comes together better than ever before. There's saloon-style piano, thumping upright bass, mountain-born fiddle and mandolin and other timeless touches that deserve to land these guys a gig on A Prairie Home Companion.
As agile and soulful as the instrumentation is, the album's heart and soul is Mattheu, whose playfully adaptive singing is part throaty defiance and part quaking vulnerability. At times he recalls Will Oldham's All Most Heaven EP with Rian Murphy, where ragged country roots similarly collided with quirky pop sensibilities and sterling lyrics. Mattheu crafts a tale of workplace malaise spilling into his personal life on "Snooze" and ably plants the phrase "Knock the cobwebs away" amongst the drowsy horns and piano of "Blueblockers."
The album opens with the locally set "I-95," a modest hoedown packing nods to booze, work (again) and "goddamn cell phones" and "shitty radio stations." A country mouse embedded in the city, Mattheu finds a lot to sing about, railing against the trappings of modern life while keeping things upbeat and fun. He's especially sweet on the ode to marriage that is "In the Valley," and the standout "Sinus Infection" kicks off with this tangled wordplay: "Between this sinus infection and this permanent erection, it's hard to win this small-town election."
On the band's MySpace page, it says Mattheu "has finally found his family of pickers and crooners." Maybe it's that family vibe that makes Finding a New Way feel so warm and welcoming.
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1. Jon said... on Nov 11, 2008 at 08:44PM
“Don't forget the amazing Bascomb brothers, who feature the one and only Ben Bradlow, a cult musical figure on Swarthmore's campus for many years.”