Crooked Still is marketed as an alt-country or an Americana group, depending on who the target audience is perceived to be. Damn marketers! Like The Sevens, the Red Clay Ramblers, and The Duhks, what you have here is the rather tasteful result of the modernity where a group absorbs a lot of influences, both individually and as a group, so that the sound is not reflective of a single tradition. Crooked Still as a band is quite tasty, but they are not based on a single tradition. I firmly believe that any reasonably good sort of trad music is always worth giving a listen to, and indeed Shaken by a Low Sound is worth hearing!
The Boston Globe said that ‘Crooked Still may be the most important folk group to emerge from Boston since the early ’60’s… state-of-the-art musical chops with a deep understanding of American traditional music’s raw melodic grace.’ As I listen to ‘Little Sadie’, a song with a theme similar to the Red Clay Ramblers’ ‘Run Sister Run’, I love the interplay of the breathy female vocalist (Aoife O’Donovan) interplaying with the Rushad Eggleston on cello, Dr. Gregory Liszt on banjo, and Corey DiMario’s bass. Notice what’s missing? Yep, no drums! Bliss! Now I don’t mind hand drums used properly as they are in, say, the Old Blind Dogs, but most drummers have all the finesse of a rock drummer on a bender. And drums in most trad music just don’t make sense to me.
On the other hand, Crooked Still has produced the perfect recording. Yes, perfect. Now, understand that I am very fussy, so a perfect album is something I rarely experience. In the trad (more or less) genre, I would include Aly Bain and Ale Möller’s Fully Rigged, Alasdair Fraser’s Dawn Dance, Horseflies’ In The Dance Tent, and Fair Warning by the late and much missed Johnny Cunningham. All are albums which get repeated play here — all are worth hearing many times.
Want to hear Crooked Still? Here’s ‘Little Sadie’.
For this review, I just played the entire album and was still impressed as to how bloody good it sounds. Not a single less-than-stellar moment was to be experienced!
The album closes with their version of a trad favorite of mine, ‘Wind and Rain’ which might be one of the most morbid tales ever told. I asked Deborah Grabien, author of The Haunted Ballads series her thoughts on this song. Here’s her response:
Crooked Still’s version works for me as beautifully as it does because they understand about subtlety. Her vocal, the stops in the instrumentation, all of it — they’ve put together a blend that leaves behind a faint, regretful echo. There’s no piledriving, and the song lingers on the memory.
(Signature Sounds, 2006)
