Then known as Ed Pettersen & The High-Line Riders, the New York outfit released their debut album, Somewhere South Of Here, in 1997. Since when, nothing. Sure Pettersen hasn’t been idle in the interim, releasing four solo albums as a folk/Americana artist and working as a songwriter and producer, his latest project being the ambitious Song of America, a 50 song history of America in music featuring such names as John Mellencamp, Blind Boys of Alabama, Martha Wainwright, The Black Crowes and Andrew Bird.
Somewhere among all this, he also decided to revive his first band, recurring original drummer Pete Abbott to join the new line up – one that includes lap and pedal steel player Mike Brenner. Rather than the folksy material of his solo recordings, this heads back to the guitar-driven American heartland rock n roll of yore, a fact underlined by the dense Neil Young/Crazy Horse like reverb of slow and steady opener ‘Every Time It Rains’, a number about the Nashville flood of 2010 featuring Freedy Johnston on background vocals.
The track pretty much sets the template for the album, the gears cranking up on ‘Small Town In My Mind’, stadium rocker ‘Hard On Me (Out of Innocence)’ and ‘I Hope You’re Happy Now’, but otherwise maintaining a slow to mid-tempo pace behind which the guitars ring and riff against Pettersen’s vocal rasp, at its best on the chugging ballad ‘Cold Comfort’ (which gets reprised as a bonus remix duet with Henning Kvitnes), the chiming title track’s Willie Nile echoes, the alt-country double whammy twang of ‘You Can’t Get There From Here’ and ‘I Don’t Think About When You Were Mine’ (the latter featuring Chuck Mead from BR549) and, again recalling Young, the sterling, organ backed ‘Holding Pattern’ which uses airport imagery to describe a relationship in limbo.
Worth particular mention, especially given the presence of Brenner who played steel for Magnolia Electric Co., is a tribute to the band’s late leader, the spooked ‘Jason Molina’s Blues’, featuring a backdrop of haunted guitars as Pettersen speaks the lyrics about meeting Molina’s ghost in an acknowledgement of the price getting up on stage sometimes exacts in the lines “you and I put it out there each and every time the bell rang. But we die every time we get it right because we know how hard it is and the next time the noose is tighter, every night, twist after twist. So try not to let it get to you even though it will.” I’m not sure how big a cause for celebration the band’s revival is outside of Pettersen’s core following, but the album it’s produced certainly warrants ringing out a few bells.
Mike Davies
Artists’ website:
‘Cold Comfort’ from the album Bumping Into Nothing:
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