REVIEW: LISTEN! LISTEN! - LISTEN! LISTEN! EP

Any time truly spent in the splendor of the rural is precious. This is not a statement of urban fantasia regarding the clean air and hearty ethic of a life more pastoral. As a people, as a Nation, we have a wholly unique connection to the land; to what is now constructed as the Rural but what was once the West or the Frontier. This piece of God’s earth was de- and re-peopled by men of little means who owned land and profited (however little) from it, rather than being tied to and part of the profit of the soils that their forbearers worked in the Motherland.

(We should stop here and state, unequivocally, that this was by no means a universal experience. Many among us descend from those who had precisely the opposite of this experience – those whose ancestors related to the land in ways other than ownership and who were brought here to be made slaves to the children of serfs; to be part of the profit of the land. But so strong remains the hegemony of those descended from the Scots-Irish push Westward that even the most recent immigrant to our shores will find themselves quickly coated in this particular micah flake of American exceptionalism and will be near powerless to prevent its internalization.)

In the rural this connection remains. Profit is still made from the very vastness of the open dirt; from proximity to where God has hidden special abundance rather than through the urban proximity of man to man. In both places there is still toil and there is still struggle, but we view each other’s space, the Urban and the Rural resident both, as a refuge and a place to flee away from the particular way in which our experience breaks our backs and ruptures our hearts. As most of us now live within beltways and loops, a buckless hunt can be near antidote to the familiar struggles, scrapes and victories of a life where the number of bars on a cell phone matters.

And this distinction is in music too. Can we, the Urban, really move beyond the roadside attraction and old-timey good feelingness of a song like ‘My Oklahoma Home’ to understand how its narrative meaning is no less beat down than that of ‘Working for the Weekend?’ While each has a pop-protest approach to the particular condition that each man must make profit in order to live, the difference is in how this struggle is espoused, expected and experienced. In that sense, though their instrumental palette is straight from an old Kentucky home (along with the few flourishes that a musician was able to save as his gypsy ghetto burned), Listen!Listen!’s self titled ep is a wholly urban experience.

It is not bluegrass; it is not country, or not even particularly folksy – though they both use entirely the same set of strings and strums, this record will never fit comfortably in any playlist that also includes the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack, or any variation on dueling banjos.

Unexpectedly rich and nuanced, it evokes the vastness of malaise rather than open air; It is the cramped beauty of a cameraphone shot of the endless grey of a cold parking-lot corner, but one that has been re-plowed and seeded because of the unexpected late-spring freeze. The lyrics, the meaning, the core of the message being communicated to you is common, and applicable and empathizable from your own city sickened experience; medications to be taken, eyes in backs of heads and all of that. But it is wrapped in so fresh a husk that it is as much an escape as waking from a slumber in a hayloft. This record made us go out and buy a banjo (seriously) and mega-dittos on feeling like no amount of our prose could do it justice. Just go buy this record – you owe yourself some peace in the valley.

Listen! Listen! release party for their self titled ep is Saturday, April 21st at Notsuoh with Jenny Westbury and Secret Sideshow also on the bill.

MP3: Listen!Listen! - The Winter of Two Thousand and Five
MP3: Listen!Listen! - Watching the Watchers Watch us Watching