Having already carved out a formidable Midwestern reputation as prime mover with Ames, Iowa’s fire’n’brimstone country rockers Moonshine Radio, Joe Young’s first semi-solo release with SOUNDS LIKE FALL comes with the weight of Americana-related expectation sitting squarely on its’ shoulders.
Not that you’d know it from the laconic, almost deathly creep of Young’s songs and the fantastically torpid creep of his grainy vocal delivery. Make no mistake: from the long sigh and cough that introduces opener “Ugly World” to the queasily brilliant gospel-blues of the closing “In Your Hands”, “The Wolf Is At The Door” is every bit as brooding and ominous as its’ title suggests.
And it’s a fascinating, personal record from stem to stern too. Much of it is sparse, and songs like “Pretty Little House” and “Precious Morning” are mostly stark and adorned with little more than Young’s bleakly attractive acoustic guitar and the gentlest of embellishments, such as the Wurlitzer organ that emerges from the ghostly, gossamer beauty of the latter or the sudden swarm of weirdo electronica that attacks “Ugly World” like a flock of mad birds.
Elsewhere, a group of sorts fill out Young’s skeletally wonderful ruminations on life, love and death. Veteran pedal steel ace Dean Thompson adds textures that drift like lazy tumbleweed over songs like the lilting “St.Majella”, and the drowsy’n’disconnected desert strangeness of “Sleeping Pills” which initially sounds as alien and lonely as the more challenging parts of Wilco’s “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.”
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Naturally, though, Young’s sleepy, gravelly voice remains the focal point, and while his rural folk roots initially recall the lugubrious likes of Sam Beam and Bill Callahan, his drawly delivery on the surprise gospel-tinged denouement of “In Your Hands” (sample lyric: “I dream of days when we’ll all be up in heaven/ Glory be to God above”) is hugely reminiscent of Townes Van Zandt, while – stranger still – his broken-down and vulnerable voice occasionally begs a Transatlantic comparison, such as on the whiskey’n’honey of “Moon To Midnight” when he sounds more like Clayhill’s under-rated Gavin Clark more than anyone else to these ears.
Admittedly, the relentlessly slow pace of virtually everything here may pose a problem for the merely curious (the nicely tongue-in-cheek “The Dirt” is the only place where the band settle into a low-key country-rock shuffle), but overall the intimacy and intrigue of “The Wolf Is At The Door” is more than enough to feed the discerning Alt.Country hunter prowling the desolate prairie.
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