Yonder Boys - Acid Folk (2020)

Yonder Boys is a Berlin-based Americana band that holds your attention hostage with crazed banjo melodies, and an intense, soaring fiddle. They’re not quite here nor there – none of the band members are German – David Stewart Ingleton (vocals, banjo) is Australian, Jason Serious (vocals, guitar) is American, and Tomás Peralta (multi-instrumentalist) hails from Chile. Their music is not strictly bluegrass, and Beach Boys harmonies have meshed with psychedelic influences and rock. Even their lyrics defy unification, ranging from abstract and cynical to descriptive and melancholic. But despite all this, their debut album ‘Acid Folk’ still works as a whole.

The last thing you can call ‘Acid Folk’ is predictable. It opens with Rabbit Song, a song about catching and cooking a rabbit, with dark lyrics like “Hang by a nail/ Old cottontail/ Are you getting ready to bleed?” contrasted with “Looking to attract a wife/ But all I get is you”. The song doesn’t ease you into the instrumental whirlwind that follows, but pushes you in headfirst, submerging the listener in a complex sonic landscape of banjo, guitar, fiddle, and old-style folk harmonies.

Eagle Song provides a welcome breather, giving space to those vocal harmonies that are somewhat overshadowed by the instrumental prowess of the first songs. The song is hopeful and melancholic, and when Serious sings: “I met you once/ In an Islington Pub/ And you said it all comes down to love”, I feel like I’m the one nursing a pint in the bar, learning how to believe in love.

That theme of tentative anticipation is continued in New Bohemians, a story of moving to Berlin to sustain the bohemian lifestyle of a musician. The banjo and the guitar find a shared language that flows naturally, with a bass rolling through like the bus that the band sings about in the lyrics: “I’m still inventing a new way to live/ Working it out on the bus to Berlin”.

When the banjo sends sparks bouncing off the walls in Look at What You Done, I feel better prepared. Even the tuba on High on a Mountain and the tenor saxophone on Mosey on Down don’t sound out of place. The puzzle pieces start to fit together. When the traditional Scottish ballad The House Carpenter comes in, I lose myself in the bliss of pastoral grass fields until the French horn comes in, sweeping me up like the waves of the seas the men are singing about.

But Yonder Boys would be damned if they finished out their album with a formulaic bluegrass composition. Instead, their voices intertwine in a song about the Sicilian moon, Italian food, and the beautiful life. “For tomorrow, pomodori, sitting watching, panorama”, they sing gently, and I imagine sitting at a table with a sea view, being lulled to sleep after downing a bottle of wine. But the end of the song jerks me awake when Yonder Boys break into untethered improvisation, soaring higher and higher until the song reaches an apotheosis. ‘Acid Folk’ breaks through the walls of genre, convention, and predictability, taking you on a wild ride which you don’t want to get off.