• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

When Mipso’s 2013 debut, Dark Holler Pop, rose to #8 on Billboard’s Bluegrass charts, the success surprised a lot of people ­­ Mipso’s four members included. “Well, we didn’t know so many people would buy it,” laughs mandolin player Jacob Sharp, “and we definitely didn’t know we were a bluegrass band.” Since then, Mipso has performed over 300 concerts, added frequent collaborator Libby Rodenbough’s voice and fiddle to the band full­time, and continued to grow as songwriters and hone their North Carolina sound. Their new release, Old Time Reverie, is a reflection of that musical and personal growth, a dark and mature sophomore release that shows them broadening their musical palate while doubling down on their experimentation with string band tradition. Dark Holler Pop embraced North Carolina’s bluegrass heritage head­on. Most tracks were recorded strictly with guitar, mandolin, fiddle, bass, and banjo, featuring guests from Chatham County Line, Town Mountain, and Mandolin Orange. The positive reviews piled up. No Depression praised their “strong streak of youthful independence” as they “handle the balance between indie pop and progressive bluegrass.” Los Angeles’ The Bluegrass Situation called their album “excellent,” adding that “their sound and live performance [are] even more unique than their name.” And in 2015 the Huffington Post applauded their ability to carry on Doc Watson’s “traditional­plus” spirit, calling them one of the top new “musical discoveries” of Merlefest. Old Time Reverie shows the group shifting their focus away from bluegrass, featuring new instruments and textures to create a distinctly different sound. Here they combine the clawhammer banjo of 1920s old time music with the distinctive electric organ of 1970s pop. Throw into the mix imaginative songwriting and a cohesion gained from two years of near­constant touring: the result is powerfully rhythmic, lyrically intelligent, and punctuated by beautiful four­part harmonies. Reviewers will surely spill ink with genre inventions. Songwriter bluegrass, lyrical folk­pop, indie­Americana. But maybe Mipso’s music makes more sense as a time machine thought experiment.* What if Doc Watson had been born in 1990 and raised on Third Eye Blind as well as old timey ballads? What if Townes Van Zandt had grown up with Paul Simon ­­ deep in the Appalachian mountains? Whatever you call their music, to hear the record is to understand the point: it’s either unlike anything you’ve heard before or exactly how you hoped the American canon of traditional music would expand. Old Time Reverie captures this feeling of backward and forward growth. Mipso has dug deeper while expanding further, making their own dark and dreamy mixture of Southern American music in the process. Before Mipso, when its members were just classmates at UNC­Chapel Hill, it was the experience of singing together in harmony that first drew them together. The sound of four blended voices remains one of the band’s hallmarks. In the same way that their music merges sounds from divergent influences, their creative process centers on the integration of these four distinct voices, instruments, and perspectives. Their commitment to collaboration and an old­fashioned concept­­harmony­­has served as a platform for entirely new avenues of sound. In the years since those college singing sessions, the four have entered a new phase of life, one where the work of making music—and the work of living—has become a more complicated affair. Many of the songs on Old Time Reverie deal with the kind of moral ambiguity that’s an unavoidable part of keeping hope in a difficult world. The songs are a dance between sun and shadow, offering “a light on the porch when it’s cold out,” as the group sings on “Father’s House.” The production and instrumentation embrace a darker sound to match the lyrical weight. “I think the sound has matured, both technically and thematically.” said fiddle player Libby Rodenbough, “Of course, we’re 25 instead of 21, and we’ve been learning to make music while we’re also attempting to make peace with ourselves and with the world around us.” At times, the task seems doomed: “Emperor’s Clothes” reckons with a world that is essentially “cold and dark”; “Mama” explores the enduring scars of loss; “Marianne” follows an interracial couple’s struggle to love one another against their community’s disapproval. Guitarist Joseph Terrell explains the genesis of the song. “Right around the time North Carolina was voting to constitutionally ban same­sex marriage, I was reading a book called “The Warmth Of Other Suns,” about The Great Migration, when so many black families were forced over decades to escape hateful communities in the South. It all made my stomach turn. I wanted to tell a story ­­ based in North Carolina in the 1960s, but still relevant ­­ of a couple trying to love each other against the odds.” Love against the odds ­­ that’s in there, too. If Old Time Reverie conjures a dark vision of the world, it also meditates on points of radiance. Even the woeful voice in “Emperor’s Clothes” professes to “believe in sparks.” Album closer “Four Train,” too, is a crinkled smile at the end of a weary day, describing love as “like a stain that won’t come out” or “like a flame that won’t burn out” ­­ or maybe, you guessed it, as both. Everywhere, in both theme and temperament, the album finds an interplay between the sunrise and the twilight ­­ a tug­of­war that’s itself an old­time tradition. From “Eliza,” a lively waltz­time romp, to “Bad Penny,” a surrealist dream sequence with an Abe Lincoln cameo, the album revels in the seesaw spectrum of experience and memory, where technicolor carnival hues blend with grown up sadness and the whispers of ghosts. Mipso’s palette, like its soundscape, is radically inclusive. This license to include, and include widely, is something the four musicians discovered in the example of their musical idols. “People sometimes seem to think of folk traditions as pristine things that need defending,” says fiddle player Libby Rodenbough, “but the history tells a really different story. These almost mythical figures in North Carolina music like Tommy Jarrell, you rarely hear about them being offended by new sounds and ideas. So we feel like open­mindedness, having an ear for all kinds of things, is a tribute to them.” Rodenbough grew up taking classical violin lessons in the Suzuki method, and has only come to explore old­time, bluegrass, Celtic, and other fiddle styles in recent years. “I still think of my playing style as evolving,” she says. “For much of this album, I got interested in what you could call a more old­time mentality about the fiddle’s role in a song ­­ playing melodies almost constantly throughout, rather than bursting in momentarily for wailing licks and flashy solos.” As she’s experimented with old ways of playing, each member has mined their musical education for responses, each of them honing in on sounds that suit the unit as a whole. For mandolin player Jacob Sharp, tradition doesn’t necessarily mean a hard gaze backwards. “I don’t think of ‘tradition’ as something to dig up from the grave,” he said. “We come from a place where traditional music is alive and well. For us, I think playing with these old influences feels really natural.” Sharp won his first mandolin off a childhood fishing bet with his dad. He sank into tradition backwards chronologically, starting with Nickel Creek, finding Sam Bush, and only then working his way back to Bill Monroe. Bassist Wood Robinson has a different path through his state’s musical tradition. “i grew up with my dad playing jazz” he said, “so guys like Coltrane and Thelonious Monk seeped into my bones a bit. I started playing upright bass to join some jazz big bands, and only in college did Joe and Jake start getting me interested in bluegrass and old time.” Robinson’s jazz knowledge influenced his bandmates, as well, adding groove and complex harmony to their acoustic fundamentals. As their personal paths attest, it isn’t a struggle for the members of Mipso to fuse traditional elements with modern influences, or even a conscious project. All four of them, after all, grew up in a state well known for cultural, political, and musical contrasts. “North Carolina has definitely changed a lot in recent years, but I think it’s history feels very present,” said Terrell. “Our progressive college town shares a county with miles and miles of farms filled with cattle and tobacco barns, next to two hundred year­old churches. My grandma was one of the first female doctors in the state,” he added, “and she taught me to play Doc Watson songs on her old Martin. I think that’s a pretty badass legacy.” After making the bluegrass­flavored Dark Holler Pop in North Carolina at The Rubber Room studio, then spending two years touring the country, you might’ve expected the band to decamp to hip Brooklyn or enlist a polished Nashville team to record their sophomore follow­up. But you’d be wrong. Instead they headed back to Chapel Hill, opting to double down on their exploration of string band territory. In a way, for Old Time Reverie, they returned to their comfort zone in order to leave it. “We went back to the Rubber Room where we’re really comfortable, and we brought in two of our closest and most talented musical friends, Josh Oliver of The Everybodyfields, on piano and electric organ, and Andrew Marlin, of Mandolin Orange, who we really trust, as producer,” said bassist Wood Robinson.

Load more

  4

Copy Link