The old-style music we hear today — be it blues or bluegrass — has become almost exclusively the province of the reverent middle class. Now, there’s plenty good to be said for keeping these musics alive, and nothing precludes the birth of great new songs in this setting.
But.
Not so many generations ago, popular musicians did not commonly come from the middle class. Performers were viewed as suspect souls of indifferent virtue: They might drink and smoke and fail to keep the Sabbath holy. It was a career chosen because it was a good bit easier than the hand work of farming and factory work, or as a way to supplement those meager earnings. It was not a life aspired to by those with trust funds.
What has been lost — one of the things which has been lost — in that transition is a certain raffish quality that underpins much of the great music from the first half of the twentieth century. Successful musicians traveled, at a time when travel was comparatively rare. And they might steal your daughter, or your wife, or your chicken, or your bottle (but not your land). And…that’s what they sang about, often, and with relish.
The Benders’ third album, as with its predecessors, proceeds with more than a twinge of that old, roguish swagger. Perhaps this is because playing bluegrass — or their variant of bluegrass — in the Boston area is not such a serious (read: competitive) enterprise as it might be further south. Probably the band’s status as a diversion to its principals’ primary groups (Jabe Beyer performs and records as Jabe; Bow Thayer fronts the Euphorians) accounts for the pleasantly relaxed quality of their recordings.
Though they are a fairly traditional acoustic ensemble — guitar, banjo, mandolin, dobro, bass, multiple vocalists — there is nothing backward-looking about the way they approach those instruments. Their songs touch on some of the standard themes — love and leaving, drink and religion, crime and punishment — but they are written in the language of this moment, not some other.
What counts above all else, though, is Thayer’s songwriting. From his opening “The Great Tear Of Josie & Ed” (yet another great crime spree song) through to the ending “Liquor Is Your Best Friend”, his contributions best capture the Benders’ buoyant flair. But it’s “Double Yellow” — call it a character study — that most clearly reveals his own careful gifts as he draws and redrafts a simple metaphor until it becomes a revealing portrait. He even tosses in an old-school wife-killing song, “Snakebit” — a newly penned “Knoxville Girl” variant.
The rest of the ensemble is nearly as good. Beyer’s title track is a fine, soaring song lovingly rooted in the geology of his Vermont home. Bassist Nolan McKelvey’s “Cheers To The First Snow” is charming and bittersweet, if somewhat closer to northeast acoustic folk in spirit.
Throughout, the quintet play with the ease of friends, the polish of pros, and the possibility of a bottle in the corner.