Jeremy Pinnell

Detail:

Hittle's spectral playing is made all the more fitting by the unshakably haunted quality of Pinnel's songs. If the band was more "heads-down-and-bash-it-out," you'd call their music "Roots Rock." But the songwriting's quiet intensity and nuanced yearning demands a more spacious approach and makes genre classifications immaterial. Pinnel's style falls somewhere between Neil Young, Damien Jurado and My Morning Jacket, balancing his strong, sharply melodic structural instinct with an emotional weight that's dark but remarkably real and so viscerally constructed it's hard not to empathize with the emanating emotions.

Pinnel is such an effective writer/singer that, like Elliott Smith or other commiserating minstrels, you find yourself hoping the author is going to be all right, despite the fact that tracks like "Me in Her Wild Hair" and "Each Note Secure" are essentially poignant, optimistic love songs. Delivering his moving words with a gargantuan ache of a voice that suggests a lump in his throat of equal size, Pinnell creates a novella of fragility and honesty with each cut. On one album highlight, "Belly of the Beast," the band crafts one of the better addiction songs since "Needle and the Damage Done," drawing the listener in with lines like "I lie in bed 'cause I'm so high/I'll call you mama/Tell you that I'm doin' bad and I can't see tomorrow."

Another stand-out, album closer "Talk to You Tonight," tackles recurring themes of lost love and self-doubt/hate ("Why would you try to fly without your wings/'Cause you might fall like me"). Stop the presses! This is easily one of the top four or five CDs to be released in our area this year. An astonishing piece of work, any way you slice it." - Citybeat