[music] THE BRUCES - The Shining Path (Misra) [3 listens]

I fear that in some cultural arena this album is unremarkable and I just don't know it. I fear this, because I'm on the verge of getting really excited about Alex MacManus and I would hate to make a fool of myself.

Thing 1: MacManus's voice. He has a Plains twang, not a southern twang, and I don't know how often you hear that in music. He also sounds inexhaustible, even while, in most songs, he's weary or resigned. Hearing him sing is like looking at a Herriman cartoon with its vital, ragged lines... he pours as much of his power into each word as is possible given the massive constraint that he must be able to keep it up forever without fail.

Thing 2: The music. Except for occasional overuse of echo (or reverb? are those the same?) these songs drift calmly through a forest of stylistic quirks without getting stranded anywhere too long. Weird jug-band backing vocals pop up briefly, or maybe some ratty horns punctuate one song, and MacManus graciously remains unbeholden to any of them. I mean, this isn't a mashup-style IDM train wreck or anything; the framework for the tinkering is the same elegiac/rueful alt-country as on the last Bruces album. MacManus just seems to have gotten his ideas about music from the kind of irritating person who insists genre boundaries literally don't exist, and then saved us all by applying them to the genre he understands.

Okay, I guess there are only two things.