Greg Freeman - Burnover LP

It’s easy to paint a picture of an alt-country revival (for lack of a better term)  crossing over from the US underground over the past three or so years (a mirror to the rise of country music in the pop charts perhaps?). This generally isn’t explicitly political music, but to my ear all these artists use a witty and wordy take on contemporary American language to directly or indirectly address the current absurdities, contradictions, and strangeness of the place. That is to say, this is music made by and for people who wear sneakers rather than dressing up in cowboy boots; a country music that rests on songwriting traditions and an excuse for a bit of pedal steel rather than cliches of truckin’ and womanising tracks or wearing suspenders and old-timey hats.

Greg Freeman’s 2nd LP (hell, probably his first LP as well but a recent stack of copies disappeared before I could hear it) are solidly in the vein of this movement. To paraphrase the liner notes, this is an album about an imagined American place he calls the Burned-Over District populated by a range of real historical characters; everyone from Jesse James to the spiritualist Fox Sisters, to Emily Dickinson, to the Presbyterian Charles Finney, and countless bartenders.

Despite all these pre-20th Century ghosts, the record doesn’t listen like a history lesson or a lame concept album. It’s wordy, yet not reliant on the liner notes. The music itself is  distant from the post-grunge 90s influences that inflect a lot of his peers (they all sound like they grew up on Bush and Marcy Playground’s ‘Sex and Candy’…). Rather, Freeman sounds to be more in the vein of Songs Ohia, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, or State Champion addressing the weird pasts that have created weird presents in the United States.—Mitch