‘In The Countryside’ – flashes of a White Album Rocky Racoon stumbling through a cartoon Dakota woodland in a Bunny Foo Foo outfit with a box of Marc Bolan records under one arm and clutching a bunch of balloons in the other; the record’s charming dumb logic, it’s whistles and bells and its wood shack drum skills in total harmony with their shuffling, acoustic surroundings and the undisciplined behaviour of auxiliary character, Ferree – a kind of latterday Alan-a-dale. And ‘Dogkillers’? A guitar-chewing, feisty blues almanac of louche morality and Jack White Zeppelin abandon. It’s not expertly played but that’s part of the charm. It’s not entirely convincing, but again that’s part of the charm. When a failed Hollywood actor picks up a guitar and starts writing songs about Christmas, the only incentive being that he may offer them to his brother in lieu of more worthwhile, expensive gifts, then you can pretty much guarantee an album full of red-herrings, digressions, transgressions, non-sequiturs and songs about rabbits running away from wolves. In fact, it’s more like the work of a bored yet inspired childminder rifling through a toy-box of fairy-tale symbolism in a rural setting with the sole purpose of entertaining. Which should come as no surprise when you learn that Ferree did indeed spend his years in Hollywood overseeing play dates with David Lynch’s children as a magic-nanny to the kids of a famous L.A scriptwriter. Not that we know who that is. Not that it really matters.
Newly signed to Domino off the back of a low-key, low-budget release in the US of A, Benjy Ferree is the Maryland born, Washington-based singer-songwriter who is positioning himself quite nicely between the screwball, tumble-tot absurdity of bands like the Animal Collective, way-out folk junkies like Daniel Johnston and Will Oldham (whose acting is greatly admired by the singer) and pop-enabled DIY eccentrics like Mark Linkous, Ed Harcourt and the Orkney’s Half Cousin. Course, there’s a smidgen of Johnny Cash (Ferree does, afterall, cover the much coveted man in black’s, ‘A Little At A Time’) and there’s the prickly old consumptiveness of Tom Waits to consider also, but in spite of all the lip-service the record has something it can call its own, owing in no small part to Ferree’s skill in tempering all his crazy hubris with occasional tenderness; the beautiful, swooning chamber orchestra that leads ‘Private Honeymoon’ into the gasoline and flames of the bluesy, ‘Leaving The Nest’ suggesting that between takes, Ferree is not simply applying make-up, but rehearsing his lines with purity and de rigueur. And just to prove the case, we have ‘In The Woods’ – a surreal yet beautiful mantra, wilfully surreal, yes, cyclic, yes, but one that illustrates the peculiar cycle of life lived amongst the trees, pointed wings and hairy faces of a merry and pastoral woodland quite handsomely (in addition to the surprising outcome of shooting at birds with no clothes on).
The sound of the American south as heard through the ears of a shameless T.Rex fan and a group of feral nursery children. On acid.
Leaving the Nest was recorded and produced in association with Dennis Kane and Fugazi’s Brendan Cant.