Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys
Yes (I Feel Sorry for You)Turntable Matinee 2006 via Yep Roc Records
Doug Wamble on vocals
Covering the Glen Campbell tune, written by Jimmy Webb
Dedicated to Ed Markoski
Isaac Freeman will be best known to most as one of the deeper-than-the-bottom-of-the-well voiced gravediggers near the end of the film O Brother Where Art Thou?
The music here keeps all tempos reigned in and all instrumental flurries to a minimum, creating the feeling of waves lapping and pouring into and out of one another. It's as if the D3 were on a vessel, playing to the ocean itself. There are hints in guitarist Mick Turner's gorgeous cover painting, which shows a tranquil mermaid on one side, a near tidal wave over a red boat on the back sleeve, and both in deep blue against a light blue background, seemingly under the ocean. On the tentative opener, "Sirena," Warren Ellis plays two- and three-notes lines, held interminably against Turner's pastoral and minimal guitar flourishes while Jim White's rhythmic constructs glisten and shimmer through the middle, offering it all more room to drift rather than create a frame. On "Distant Shore," a tune built on three chords and a fragment, Ellis puts the album's tentative nature forth in the elegantly twisting lilt of his violin, creating a melody that is simply a chant, as Turner and White slip around his center, creating a view of the shore and the ground, mirage-like and ephemeral, and presented through a watery prism, as mournful, left behind, turned away from. - AMG
Elvin Bishop on vox / produced by David Grisman with Norton Buffalo