Freakwater

So much music is manufactured today, sounding slick and mirror like.  Shiny beats and creamy confections are the norm.  Freakwater is the opposite.  The band, fronted by Catherine Irwin and Janet Bean specialize in a form of country music that reflects the Appalachian roots of the genre without being remotely slavish.  Their dissonant vocal harmonies are bracing and jagged, ominous, even when the lyrics might dictate otherwise.  It  is a great effect.

Freakwater's muse lies deep in the hollows of  the Appalachian Mountains, along mountain streams and in the run down lives of the dispossessed.   Songs of heartbreak, love, and destruction walk into the light still trailing dark shadows of sadness and desperation.  It's a living, I suppose, but a tough one.  Backed by perennial bassist David Wayne Gay and a shifty cloudbank of musicians, Irwin and Bean produced some great music during the bands initial run from 1989 to 2006.  From 2006 until 2013 the band went on hiatus, after which the reformed band went on the road behind a rerelease of  1993's Feels Like the Third Time.  In 2016, Scheherazade, their first new album since 2006, was released to great acclaim.  Catherine Bean, who began her musical life in the violent swirl of punk music, mentioned that she couldn't see herself playing that music into her later years, but could do with their type of country music; and that is a serious relief, because I'll be listening.