WHITE HASSLE
Your Language
Fargo

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“Just a taste of the hair of the atomic dog...”

Normally a dry arid sort of soundscape would be associated with Americana from its traditional Southern homelands. The dry, woody sound of this record comes more from the cold air blown in from the Eastern Seaboard, where playing the harp could almost be learnt as a by-product of blowing into your cupped hands to fend off the freeze, and melding together hip-hop rhythms and skanking Two-Tone ska (‘All Night Long’), sharing a waltz on the porch with Paul Westerberg (‘Neon, Not The Night’), then hitting the hard stuff with him (‘Lazy Susan’) composing sea-shanty sing-a-longs as though you’re writing for the nursery where your sister teaches the kids of various Pogues and the odd Guthrie grandchild (‘Halfway Done With The Tour’), and scripting stream of consciousness lyrics like an un-lobotomised Lou Reed (‘I’ll be your knight in armour / I’ll be your organic farmer’ in the marriage of  ‘Sloop John B’ to ‘Sweet Eloise’) is a completely natural way of combusting into an urbane and urban sophisticated boom-boom. If only. I’m not sure that the turntable trickery is absolutely necessary as it’s neither complimentary nor detrimental and raises comparisons to Gomez and Alabama 3, but that doesn’t stop the title cut being a merry wheeze through the language barrier. If it all initially comes across as clever clever eclectic art school / drama / music student smugness glory in it and appreciate that there’s no trace of garage, punk-funk or run of the mill ‘Mericana, whilst containing tangible traces of all three and more, as on the reggae-fied hip-hop fused Fall of ‘Vodka Talking’. Like David Byrne reborn as an evangelist for a curious calypso country combination, turntables, Telecasters, harps on hip hop beaten tracks played in garage jams sampling early Ben Harper records.
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-Stu Gibson