Slow-core and alt-country had a brief marriage in the mid- to late ’90s, with releases by artists like the Scud Mountain Boys and the Oldham brothers’ various Palace-themed projects. The best known were Cowboy Junkies. I’m sure there were a bunch of others that I don’t know about. It was never a huge interest of mine at the time (I like it more nowadays), although I became a big fan of Gillian Welch and the Handsome Family, both of whom were fond of slowing down folk and country songs to a dirge-like tempo.
The Portland, Oregon-based band Vacilando makes music in much the same vein — post-modern alternative country, played at slow tempo, dealing largely with themes of ennui and loss and emotions on the sad end of the scale. The band’s name is a Spanish word that was defined by John Steinbeck in his book Travels With Charley: In Search of America, thusly: If one is vacilando, he is going somewhere, but does not greatly care whether or not he gets there, although he has direction. That pretty well describes the songs on this short album. Vacilando’s songs are going somewhere, but they take their time. As always when this sort of thing is done right, that opens up the songs to all sorts of interesting things for those who approach them with a keen ear, an open heart and a patient attitude.
Vacilando started as a vehicle for the solo work of John Shepski, who wanted to create loosely structured songs in a singer-songwriter vein. He was joined by Juniana Lanning, who sings harmonies and plays percussion and engineers ambient sounds; and bassist Chad Lanning. Jason Montgomery now adds pedal steel and Sharon Cannon guests on violin.
With six tracks, While They Were Dancing is technically an EP. But those tracks average six minutes each in length, so the total is close to LP length. Various ambient sounds are used inside the songs as well as between them — snippets of radio preachers and the indistinguishable babble of people in public spaces, plus electronically produced sounds and the clicks and pops of an old vinyl record on a turntable. The opener “Down All Day” starts with a whisper of ambient sounds and ever so slowly builds to an emotional and sonic peak at the 4:30 mark, when the distorted pedal steel comes in along with bass and drums. In the denoument, Shepski sings a few times in his weathered, plaintive tenor, “If you don’t know by now, it’s only in your head, I hope you’ll find out soon.”
The songs all are originals except for a cover of the classic country standard “Tennessee Waltz.” I love the latter (a line from which provides the album title), but my favorites are the songs on either side of it, the languid waltz “The Ocean, While You Sleep” and the lullaby that ends the album, simply titled “Sleep.” The former’s lyrics are mostly pairs of things in couplets sung by Shepski over mesmerizing electric guitar and pedal steel vamping. The song crashes into a roaring instrumental break on distorted guitars at the end of the second verse like a panic attack in the night. When the noise returns as an instrumental outro after the third verse, it’s more as an old if troubling friend whose moodiness you’ve come to expect and even welcome.
“Sleep” is a beautiful love song to either a lover or a child, with a humorously self-deprecating opening line: “Sleep — it’s all that’s gonna save you from the music in your head.” But Shepski goes on to make a series of lyrical promises that on the page look corny but in his delivery (with beguiling harmonies from Ms. Lanning) and the arrangement add up to more than the sum of their parts. It takes a certain amount of bravado to write and sing songs like of such naked emotion and at such a tempo that reveals even the tiniest flaws, and Shepski & Co. pull it off with aplomb. Vacilando is surely an act to see live, and While They Were Dancing is definitely a disc to pay attention to.
Listen to “The Ocean, While You Sleep” from Vacilando.
(Fluff and Gravy, 2015)
