listen Mind and Mother

"As pop becomes more of an assembly-line affair involving multiple producers, engineers, and guest stars - you could call it craftsmanship by committee, or maybe a music-making gang bang - it doesn't take a bird brain to notice the flock of solitary singer-songwriters flying to the fore these days. The latest in that sometimes endangered species, Burd Early, a.k.a. James Angelos, isn't the ranch-loving nature boy the late Townes Van Zandt once was, though the comparison is inevitable considering the titles of B.E.'s Mind and Mother and the Texas crooner's Our Mother the Mountain. Angelos's habitat resembles the wrenching, terse terrain of Cat Power and Will Oldham more than it does the sweeter plains of the Flatlanders and Willie Nelson. Nonetheless Angelos and Van Zandt turn out to be singular folk of a feather, comfortably couched in craft, familiar yet enticingly out of tune with the rest of the crowd. Angelos obviously has different issues. For one, he thinks too much. Check out his mind, separate but equal to the eternal maternal and the self-flagellating focus of the title tune: "Mind and mother, unrealized flower / How cruel I have been to you / No more lashing out, tearing petal from flower." Resisting the urge to bury his listeners in empty rhymes or retreat into the nostalgic, old-time religion of American folk, Angelos finds more than a few eloquent ways to convey his alienation. On "Blackdot," connection is just an AIM message passing in the night, blinking like a new-media come-on, or a carrot dangling the promise of community. "I'm sitting at a terminal / Reading other people's lives / Hoping through this, to find mine," he sings, convinced he'll never find an answer to that eternal question "Are you my mother?" He finds some uneasy harmony in a duet with Rosario Garcia-Montero ("Undoing the Day"), but just as quickly he's back to his beautifully depleted self, reveling in minor-chord melancholy, trudging tempos, and spooky, twanging asides. Long may he groan, if it leads to this kind of poetry." -San Francisco Bay Guardian