{"product_id":"lou-turner-strangels-lp","title":"Lou Turner - Strangels LP","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFor the past three years, poet and musician Lou Turner has been steadily road dogging it across the country and world, as a member of Ryan Davis \u0026amp; The Roadhouse Band, on a MJ Lenderman tour, and in her own trio of Nashville indie chooglers, the Styrofoam Winos, but for her masterful new album Strangels, Turner went back home. Feeling the need for solitary exploration while buoyed by the confidence she gained playing stages from Newport to Austin City Limits, she decided to record in her home studio, self-produce, and play almost all the instruments herself (her partner and fellow Winos member Trevor Nikrant contributes pedal steel on a few tracks and keys on one). What emerged was Turner at her freest and most relaxed—her lyrics, succinct and direct, playful and deep; her playing—of guitars, electric bass, upright bass, drums, flute, marimba, synthesizer, organ, and percussion—joyful and adventurous, spanning influences from Judee Sill to Alice Coltrane to Neil Young.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThough largely the work of Turner alone, Strangels is not a lonely record. Like her two previous SPINSTER releases, this too is an album with a consistent theme, through which Turner, Noah-like, builds her own weird ark of the animal kingdom’s “strangels” (a portmanteau of strange angels): horses and “bad boy” snakes, fireflies\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"bcTruncateMore\"\u003e and vultures (“though demonized in our culture”), as she ventures into the flood waters of thematic dualities: the strange and the angelic, the folky and the pokey, the earth-bound and the heavenly, and all the spirited interspecies and interdimensional encounters between.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTurner found inspiration in Fanny Howe’s essay, “Bewilderment,” in which the poet and novelist writes, “Bewilderment is an enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability. It cracks open the dialectic and sees myriads all at once.” With each song on the record, Turner takes us deeper into such an enchantment, as she pulls different versions of herself into dialogue with earthly creatures. The first track and lead single “Ants Underfoot” offers an inviting overture to the rest of the album, with its fluttering flutes, fingerpicked guitar, and swinging drums, over which Turner sings, “Hopefully\/ Some uncertainty\/ Helps us to receive\/ That we can’t get everything\/ There’s a seed rewildering in me.” After the last verse she puns, “Bewilder me\/Be wilder me”, “Rewilder me\/ Re-wilder me,” a fitting incantation for this expansive album. Along with Howe, there’s a bit of Iris Dement’s “Let the Mystery Be” (which Turner has covered) here too—a reassociation with the self amid the disassociation of life’s mysteries. This is a record that is in love with the world and all its wonder.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe chord progression on the poetic and languid third single “Beaver Moon” was born from the simple idea of ascending the scale in order: G, Am, Bb, C, D, Em, F, G. The conceit is not incidental to the song’s theme, though, as in folklore, November’s full moon arises during a time of preparation for winter, when beavers take to their dens and fish spawn, the harvest is done and ready to be stockpiled for the cold months ahead. The chord progression, lyrics, and spiritual jazz flourishes conjure a deep meditation on cycles: within the self and in relationships, and along the winding path of making art in a world that values money and power most over slow, natural rhythms.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOf the Youngian rocker “No Gate,” Turner says, “In some ways the lyrics are about my childhood growing up in an evangelical church and the things I was taught about gender and virtue. But they’re also interrogating the way gender and virtue (and genius) are depicted in another tradition I come from, which is that of the American (mostly male) songwriter, where Bob Dylan is almost like a Christ figure.” She says that at one point the first line of the song, “When God’s the only boy\/ Scrawled with hearts in your notebook \/ You know there’s a slow train coming\/ That might be faster than it looks,” originally had “Bob” in place of “God,” but it didn’t quite work. The reference to Dylan-as-paradigm through the lyrical allusions of a “slow train coming” and “man gave name to all the animals” remains though, alongside the narrow archetype of Eve depicted in the Garden of Eden, compelling Turner to go “Out lookin’ for a creature not yet named \/ Maybe a pasture with no gate.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStrangels culminates with the song pairing of “Ark” and “Strange Angels,” both of which use Joni Mitchell’s Hejira tuning—a musical bewilderment if there ever was one. Turner wrote “Ark” in one sitting, its lyrics and melody spilling out, making it feel more found than written. With her signature fingerpicked guitar, shimmering marimba, and clear voice, she casts a powerful spell of protection against it all: self-doubt, greed, isolation, the disasters of a warming planet, apocalypse: “Be not afraid.” “Strange Angels” is the album's transcendent coda, a Judee Sill-esque grace for all the eccentric human characters that bless you with their presence on tour, the little green garden snake that greets you on a walk, the one-eyed cat that makes his home yours. “Strange angels\/ Find them\/ Flying\/ Close to the ground.” Lou Turner’s Strangels is not just an ode to the wonder of God’s creation, but the wonder, too, of self-creation, as she constructs in a sense, an ark of the self, gathering the disparate parts of her that are the road dog rocker, the cat lady poet, the pastor’s kid, the deft singer-songwriter, the jazz percussionist, the seeker, and the knower. What is the noun of assemblage for those many selves? It just might be a “strangel.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e –Spinster\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ciframe style=\"border: 0; width: 100%; height: 472px;\" src=\"https:\/\/bandcamp.com\/EmbeddedPlayer\/album=957645805\/size=large\/bgcol=ffffff\/linkcol=0687f5\/artwork=none\/transparent=true\/\" seamless\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/louturner.bandcamp.com\/album\/strangels\"\u003eStrangels by Lou Turner\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/iframe\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"MGM Distribution","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":67957609234614,"sku":null,"price":42.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0525\/9119\/8390\/files\/a2439465103_10.jpg?v=1793324433","url":"https:\/\/repressedrecords.com\/products\/lou-turner-strangels-lp","provider":"Repressed Records","version":"1.0","type":"link"}