This eponymous album is the third full-length offering from San Franciscan duo Two Gallants, and it’s bursting at the seams with a confident full sound that belies the low number of musicians involved.
The roots of the Two Gallants‘ approach is in delta blues, blended with elements of the American folk fingerstyle tradition and filtered through the more modern do-it-yourself traditions of punk and alternative rock.
Adam Stephens plays deceptively simple guitar, with plucked chord arpeggios over minimal basslines giving the impression of two musicians where there is only one – and adding a third with the occasional introduction of hobo harmonica hooks. Meanwhile, Tyson Vogel plays a simple drumkit, pinning down the rhythm successfully but filling out the space in the soundscape with improvisational excursions, never playing the same bar the same way twice.
The result is music that breathes, sounding simultaneously full and fragile, busy and minimal, and acting as the perfect vehicle for Stephens’ voice, which has a ragged passion about it that brings to mind a slightly inebriated young busker on a cold winter’s afternoon, a punk singing the blues with all the heart he can muster. The almost strangled style brings to mind someone spoofing Dylan with their tongue half in their cheek.
The lyrics themselves are more than a trifle Dylanesque, also. There’s a certain subtle poetry here – not the high-brow pontification of the literary types, but the slope-shouldered hard-luck tales of the Beat Generation, a warts-and-all look at the past and the present that spends less time on laying blame than on painting pictures. There’s history here, side by side with subtle humour and modern pop-culture references, never feeling false, acknowledging absurdity and confusion without submerging beneath them. The lack of self-pity and complaint is striking – striking, and refreshing.
Rare is the band that makes it to a third album in this day and age, indie labels or otherwise, but listening to Two Gallants makes it easy to realise how they’ve pulled it off. They’ve got the courage of their own convictions, the sound of artists who’d be cranking out this music for beer money if they’d never been signed, doing it for the love not the lucre. A great soundtrack for the next time you’re waiting for a late train on the morning after a long long night before.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: acoustic, blues, indie, punk, Two Gallants
