The Walkabouts on Fin Records

Fin records are back with this single from The Walkabouts a Seattle based six piece, who started playing together about 30 years ago were signed to both Sub Pop and Virgin along the way. After a five year hiatus they came back in 2011 with Travels in the Dustland and the first track "My Diviner" is also the A-Side here. Carla on vocals has a sultry kind of given-up-on-life sound, those experienced piano bar pipes that feel like 'I've seen it all kid'...a little bit defeated, but still singing about a saving grace, and there's that ray again. Slow steel guitar whines and big delay creating a ridiculously huge landscape with this slow rhythm tumbling along. The plodding tectonic shift bassline... which is the only real melody along with this underlying acoustic while that high pitch hum of northern lights from the steel guitar drones on. It's a great sound, you'd think there's really nothig you can't play on that thing, it's really all about that sound itself. The emotional place those sliding notes get you. The same goes for this entire track, creating that solemn, slow dance mood. Even a distortion slide in there for a variance of sad...all the shades are represented.

B-Side's "Neu Death Valley" further explores this southwestern sound, I'm hearing a bit of Calexico or Giant Sand, this one slowly rising out of that cracked mud, sustained distortions and twinkling bells, that shimmer of heat waves coming off the highway, silouettes of a lone figure walking closer coming up over that hill. A instrumnetal, subtly changing, hardly a track, or even music in any kind of pop sense, a big departure from the A-Side, like The Late Virginia Summers or Long Division, they're playing with the changing of time, how expanded a song can be revealing in the way it's created. A monument to the passage of time. A gleaming giant monolith that says, you better appreciate all of it the way you do this.

In typical no expense spared style, the lyrics are printed big on the colored insert, embossed with the Fin logo, hand numbered, the band name an homage to the Nicholas Rogue singular tense film. Head over to Fin Records to listen to samples of these tracks and place your order.