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Hayden Pedigo is a perfectionist. Every sound you hear on his new record I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away sounds meticulously intentional – nothing is out of place. This delibracy is exactly what makes his sound stand out among other Americana folk guitarists like John Fahey and Jack Rose. If Fahey and Rose’s arrangements scuttle along haphazardly like a Pollock painting, Pedigo’s guitar playing feels like the precisionist aspects of Charles Sheeler’s Western industrial – restrained, austere, and geometric . Similarly, it’s like comparing Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller to Anthony Mann’s The Naked Spur – both strikingly peculiar in their own way.
Across its seven tracks, I’ll Be Waving concludes Pedigo’s “Motor Trilogy” with ironic sincerity. “I actually want you to meet me, I want you to know who I am”, Pedigo declares on the record’s press release. The opening standout single “Long Pond Lily” fits perfectly into Pedigo's description of the record: “a microdose psychedelic album… as if somebody had cut up a tab of LSD and put on a Fahey record.” The surreal and whimsical electric guitar licks that slice through the track’s acoustic backbone achieve a sense of flippantness that foreshadows the thesis of I’ll Be Waving. Elsewhere, on “Houndstooth”, Nathan Bieber’s violin provides a melodramatic nostalgia that challenges the common myths of the American West – lawless heroes, romanticized opportunity, and unclaimed land designed to serve economic ambitions and bolster political agendas.
The myth of the American West attracts those who long for new beginnings. It offers an ethereal space for introspection and independence, and presents an alluring challenge to overcome and conquer. I’ll Be Waving takes on this challenge, while at the same time attempts to fixate on Pedigo’s distinctive voice. It’s quite the endeavor and can, at times, feel forced and bloated. Take the track “Smoked”, for example. An airy presence floats in the background while Pedigo quietly saunters through an emotional landscape. The track feels entirely contrived – it is not the American West that we are all so familiar with. So what happens when you attempt to lasso something as vast an idea as the American West? You get something that was achieved by Jimmy Stewart in the aforementioned The Naked Spur – a mismatch in tone, an error of expectations. When this myth is denied, that is, when the West is no longer presented as surmountable but a land that has been subdued and restrained, the romanticized and mysterious notion of independence evaporates entirely.
Indeed, there’s a worry when taming something as enigmatic as the American West. In one view, I’ll Be Waving sounds like millennial malaise fused with Western anemoia. Along these lines, there are characteristics of a hauntological record sprinkled throughout I’ll Be Waving – sounds pining for a mythical landscape that will never return (and arguably never even existed). Nevertheless, it’s evident that Pedigo was fully aware of this all along, as the concluding title track abandons everything that came before it. “It’s like I removed all irony from my music. It’s so sincere that I think it will be startlingly sincere, jarring even, for some people” Pedigo admits while discussing this track. It seems obvious that this tongue-in-cheek highlight is the crux of the record – a flippant gesture to everything that preceded it. Pedigo’s gentle picking of his guitar and the track’s cheerful lucidity ushers in a sense of vindication, and one that highlights the absurdity of the record’s maximalist endeavors. In other words, it offers a resolution to the unwarranted feelings of loneliness, desire, and melancholy that came before it. To top it all off, the record ends even more facetiously, with a reading of its players and a thank you from Pedigo. It’s the first time we’ve heard Pedigo’s voice throughout the Motor Trilogy – an unexpected treat from an unexpected goodbye.
- NS
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