at a glance...

Hometown: Chicago, IL via Nashville, TN
Year Formed: 1994

Members:
Charles Kim -electric, slide and pedal steel guitars, melodica, marimba, celesta, banjo, mandolin, loops
Ryan Hembrey -upright and electric bass
Darren Richard -vocals, acoustic and electric guitars, accordion, piano, drums, banjo, marimba, loops

You're sure to have one helluva time classifying Pinetop Seven's music. Make it easy on yourself and give it up.

On first listen, Rigging The Toplights, the band's latest release, reveals many familiar reference points. When you hear tracks like "Wake" and "Empty Hands and the Long Walk Home," you may have the band pegged as slumming students of Tom Waits' rusty carnival back-up band. Put on "For The Fear of Being Found," and you'll hear traces of Uncle Tupelo at their most doleful. But before the track is halfway through, you'll notice wisps of Ennio Morricone's arid spaghetti western compositions with motes of Aaron Copland swirling throughout. By the time you get to "Rust In His Step," with its waltzy, french cabaret feel, they've thrown a spanner (in the guise of Astor Piazzolla) in the works, and it's clear that Pinetop Seven are in a class all their own.

But the most salient feature of Pinetop Seven's decidedly cinematic sound is the lyrical content. Richard uses his dusty voice like an instrument, wending images of dissatisfaction, loss and dissipation through stirringly impressionistic arrangements. He infuses his lyrics with just enough painfully personal imagery to give them universal appeal. Take "Our First Drunk Dream," a sort of imagistic haiku. Within three terse lines: "bare shoulder blades in June/ trembling in the wet grass/ the joke wraps around us too," Richard evokes a stream of very personal feelings and impressions without alienating his audience.

"Floorboards" boasts some very Faulknerian imagery: "sit down/ in the chair you made for me/ with its knotted old legs/ kinda like mine/ the dog shrinks away from my hand/ as he's found/ his owner playing dead/ on the ground." "1st of May," a poetic recitation accompanied by a suspended accordion and elastic slide guitar line, succeeds where other self-consciously sentimental slices of neo-American folk fail. It tells of love's carousel of ascents and falls with bland precision and a sense of stark reality.

If you try to categorize Pinetop Seven, you're missing the point...and that point, when you get it, is just too good to miss out on.