Chatham County Line - Route 23

Genre bluegrass Publisher Yep Roc Records External Links Yep Roc Records

Ah Bluegrass. Let me lay my cards on the table straight away here, I'm British, and this stuff, with its 'boxcars' 'county lines' and 'gully-washers' is about as foreign to me as it's possible to get, so I've got to admit I approached Chatham County Line's Route 23 with extreme trepidation.

I shouldn't have worried - this is glorious stuff. It probably helps that this is bluegrass filtered through all kinds of later American music. Even to British ears echoes of Dylan and The Band, Neil Young and The Jayhawks pepper the CD.

One of the great joys of Route 23 is the ensemble playing and singing. A quick visit to any Bluegrass website confirms that the musicians involved are among the creme de la creme of American Bluegrass talent but even if these guys are the Yngwie Malmsteens of the banjo it doesn't lead to rounds of solos: instead it's a gloriously democratic sound, four musicians round one mike, instruments weaving deftly in and out of each others space.

Opener "Nowhere to Sleep" sets the scene perfectly - bubbling instrumentation, bittersweet harmonized vocals and a lyric that still sounds full of joy despite the subject matter. And it's this trick of combining joy and heartbreak, the new and the traditional, that makes so much of the album so engaging. A quick change of scene for the keening "Dark Clouds" and then the band really starts to stretch themselves.

The centrepiece of the album is the title track , "Route 23." Simultaneously sounding jaunty and world-weary. It's the tale of the closure of a rural Route 23 service station driven from business by the introduction of a new highway: a subject close to the heart of main songwriter Dave Wilson, who's own father's Charlotte hardware store suffered a similar fate. Its concerns are with a passing of a simpler kind of American life, when nothing changed but "the seasons and the colors of the hoods" run through Route 23. But whenever the sense of loss and longing present in so many of these tracks threatens to get oppressive Chatham County Line neatly counter it with liquid, bright-eyed frolics like the instrumental "Sun Up."

Chatham County Line save the best for last though. "Saro-Jane" is the most impressionistic track on the CD. A dark southern gothic lyric, it employs the best singing of all the cuts. Distant military drums and gorgeous sparse instrumentation result in the kind of haunted hymn that Nick Cave should be fighting to cover. It's followed by a romping, sprightly run-through of Don Robertson's "Born to be with You." The song, probably best-known from Dion's sprawling Phil Spector-produced 1975 version, and much loved by Pete Townsend and Bobby Gillespie. Here the foursome strip the song back to it's barest bones and present it as a two-minute rush of adrenalin, with no frills and no bombast. It's a fiiting finale to to a little unspoiled gem of an album.