“Two guys from Poland making music together since forever. There were many bands and even more music genres, now they sit in a kitchen, smoke cigarettes and worship old ghosts with cursed folk blues notes.”
The band description for Polish duo Blues for Neighbors drew me in as soon as I read it, because it cleverly alluded to a setting everyone is familiar with – sitting around a friend’s kitchen table, consuming whatever their fridge or kitchen cabinet have to offer while listening to one album or other from their record collection. Interesting conversation can be had in such a setting. The music resulting from it, I thought, might be interesting as well. The genre specifications that followed the band description listed gothic Americana, dark folk and death country which also sounded right up my alley. The cover looked good too, featuring an old-school Western-style comic strip drawing of a lone cowboy on a horse above a cross in the ground. So far, so intriguing.
‘Americana from Poland?’ you might ask doubtfully, and I have to admit that it is a bit of a stretch. With underground music, authenticity is most important – people incorporating their own, original, authentic self into their music. If you don’t have authenticity, you have nothing. The musicianship, the production, nothing matters, if what you are offering isn’t credible. Fake is not what subculture is looking for. Fake is the realm of the mainstream.
Having said that, one has to take into account that we live in a globalized world, that American culture, music and movies are omnipresent, and that the Blues or Americana don’t belong to anybody. Rural life is similar everywhere around the developed world. Hard work, badly paid, paired with a lack of entertainment, limited society and limited options create the same problems in differing countries and bread similar sentiment.
Whatever their reasons for worshiping and playing folky Blues, MG and PO, the two guys who make up Blues for Neighbors, have definitely done their research and are doing their best to sound like their origins are not in Eastern Europe but somewhere in the rural US. Vocals, guitar, mandolin, banjo, harmonica, and a tiny bit of programming make up their sound and if it wasn’t for the unmistakably un-American accent, you would never know that they aren’t from the US.
The acoustic instrumentation of album opener Mr Ike creates a credible Southern, folky sound, transporting you to another continent and another time. The same is true for track number two, Dark Prayer Blues. The soundscapes and the riffing on the first two songs are very similar which nicely corresponds to the monotony of rural life, but also makes the listener wonder if this is how the album will continue – with variations of the same riff. Another aspect is also quite clear after the first two songs already and that is that the production and the mixing have some peculiarities. The vocals have been mixed below the string instruments which seems odd for this kind of music. It’s not black metal, for Satan’s sake. Track number three Each Drop is the Ocean starts out with the sound of horse hoofs clapping or a coach rattling, calling the Wild West to mind. This fits well together with the cowboy on the album cover and works to further build up atmosphere. Dead Man Boogie continues in the same vein, whereas I Suffer strikes a more melancholic, bluesy note.
The best pieces of music on the album if you ask me are Falling Trees, track six, and Sally in the Garden, song number seven. Falling Trees is the longest and most complex track on the album, a mixture of country and folk, with jingles, mandolin and guitar tunes with a hint of the Middle Ages. Sally in the Garden, an instrumental, starts out with the twittering of birds and speaks of a simple life, with hardships, simple pleasures and an inherent beauty.
Smoking With Satan, the final track, returns again to the Southern sound and the monotonous riffing from the album’s beginning. That’s a bit of a shame, because it makes the excellent work of the previous two songs somewhat undone. I’d rather have remembered the album for Falling Trees and Sally in the Garden.
So… If I were sitting around a friend’s kitchen table, sipping a drink, talking and they had just played me From Roaming About by Blues for Neighbors and were asking for me for my opinion about it, what would I say? Well, I’d say that was not bad at all, but that it didn’t come close to the real deal regarding atmosphere, sentiment and story. I’d also say that I really liked the instrumental medieval-sounding folky track and that the band maybe should explore that road a bit further.
(6/10 Slavica)
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