Home Spun
Tall Tales and the Silver Lining
By David Cotner 06/04/2009
Freak: out
Trevor and Tania Beld-Jimenez’s gentle folk persuasions hang softly in curved air, not so much the dreaded “freak folk” as revivals of simple, serviceable and workmanlike Americana music written as though from the inside looking out — which, admittedly, remains a place from which it’s all the better to open the door and welcome you, bringing you back inside. Occasionally, the press has touted Tall Tales and the Silver Lining as Trevor’s “one-man” project, but the messages that ring forth soundly from in-between those grooves are notes of friendship and family, an envelopment that fails to exclude even the cleanest-shaven casual bystander.
In a family way
The record release party — a soiree that also calls forth related bands along the Tall Tales axis, including Land ’n’ Sea, Deepak Super, Watercolor Paintings and Tall Tales lap steel player Seth Petterson — marks the debut of the band’s full-length release The Understanding. Fifteen tracks of understated grace skip across the surface of the record, most, if not all, of which will likely be played at the Art Barn in Ventura. It’s out on local imprint Beehouse Records, formed five years ago by Ventura indie band the Spires to release their own music; but, of course, when a meteor falls in your backyard you just don’t call up NASA right after it hits. You show all your neighbors this sparkling thing come to you from on high.
Influence peddling
Along with the inestimable Beld-Jimenez clan, the other players — bassist Jason Bays, percussionists Brook Dalton and Brian Granillo, guitarist Nels Rosengren, backing singer Heather Rae, effects processor Landon Smith and keyboardist Rory Stalwick — pledge their allegiance and plead their alignment to such disparate influences at Michael Nyman, Gram Parsons and “riding bikes.” All of these things work their way into the finished product, even if a list of influences without context often hangs squarely between “Which One Doesn’t Belong?” and “Jumble, That Scrambled Word Game.” Too often, the danger is one of perfecting celery soda when you really wanted to create a better root beer — and yet listening to songs like “Earthling” and the title track from “The Understanding,” everything falls into place and one can easily place that Laurel Canyon folk rock sound just as easily as the minimalist orchestral passages from a Nyman piece.
Something before electricity
“Americana” is an odd genre to explore these days — chiefly because the essence of American music tends to have been splintered, incorporeal; to paraphrase Steve Martin’s recent observations about bluegrass music, “In Americana, a minor hit is a major hit.” The word brings to mind the brilliant 1983 David Carradine film Americana, about a drifting Vietnam vet who settles in a small rural town and heals himself by rebuilding the town’s disused, dilapidated merry-go-round. There’s much of that same kind of primal, regenerative energy in the simple, but not simplistic, strains of Tall Tales and the Silver Lining. It’s as obvious as the name of the band itself: the promise of something transcendent, glistening and richly illuminating.
Tall Tales and the Silver Lining record release party at the Art Barn, 856 E. Thompson on Saturday, June 6, at 7 p.m. $3, all ages. To learn more, visit www.myspace.com/talltalesmusic.
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