Hoth Brothers Band - Tell Me How You Feel (2021)

An album of positivity in an uncertain world, The Hoth Brothers – Bard Erdington V, Sarah Ferrell and Boris McCutcheon recorded all 17 tracks on Tell Me How You Feel, their second album, in just three days. Not once does it sound like a rush job. Erdington on banjo and Ferrell playing upright bass will all three on vocals, it opens with the bubbling old school Carter Family-styled bluegrassy Judith, the story of an old painter in the New Mexico mountains who refuses to return to the city when she falls ill, favouring nature over wasting her remaining days in an urban jungle.

Featuring mandolin and harmonica, Tell Me What You’re Thinking is a jaunty jog with hints of John Prine that takes a swipe at leaders who don’t give a damn while, turning to thoughts of nature again, the lazy banjo rhythm Cliff Fendler relates to a native flower of the south-central mountain regions and the scampering call and response Honey Guide with McCutcheon’s mandolin solo follows a bird through a forest looking for life’s sweetness.

From forest they move to the sluggishly flowing San Juan River of Slickhorn, McCutcheon adding harmonica and Greg Williams joining on slow march drums, conjuring a mix of The Band and Oh Brother mountain music echoes. By geographical contrast, the dusty mandolin-trilled waltztime sway of Volendam shifts to the Netherlands, Ferrell adding harmonies on the refrain before a musical shift to the slide guitar groove of the playful dog house blues Cherry Pits.

Heading to the halfway mark, co-written by all three, each contributing and singing a verse about unrequited crushes, Trouble And Desire rides a strummed guitar and mandolin fluttering cowboy campfire rhythm.

The rest of the album unfolds in a similarly equally variegated manner, ranging from the old-time string band front porch gospel jauntiness of the canine mourning Pappy’s Last Ride and the dark folk clues shades of Behold The Passage that muses on how sometimes people don’t want to be freed for their metaphorical prisons to the clanking lurch of the sparse and spooked tango-twisted Boogieman Mesa about the curse of America’s oldest town.

Striking a contemporary note, sung a capella by all three voices, One Hard Rain is a coronavirus apocalypse number that rather creepily likens the rapid spread of Covid-10 to Santa Claus traversing the globe, suggesting in its unfolding perhaps a biblical plague-like humbling to humankind, the struggle and suffering of the victims of misfortune extending to the dustbowl folksiness of Poor Man’s Light.

Ferrell gets to take an all too rare vocal spotlight for the banjo-based, shaker-shaded five-minute Wilding Of Robby, an account of the earlier years of the character featured on the previous album’s Wild Robby, the insidious melody backdropping the dark dustbowl tale of a cowpuncher’s daughter, secret trysts, unspoken feelings and, as the others’ voices join in for the climax, a murder that enfolds a telling of how “dad shot the devil”.

It ends with the old time pioneer folksiness of the river song Sam Hill, the west Texas waltzing Dyin’ For Diane, a pining for the jackhammer-wielding object of the singer’s affections whom in transpires, as Ferrell responds, swings the other way, and, finally, returning to where it began, the sole cover, Rough Ragged Edge, penned by the late Lewie Wickham and capturing the old spirit of New Mexico in a manner akin to Butch Hancock. Tell me how you feel, they ask. Well, after listening to this, damn fine.