The (s)Wheat Spot!

You Were the Sound

So I promised album reviews, and reviews you shall get.



"So say the answer slowly/Say it if you know/Why it took thirty-eight chapters for/The Lord to answer Job"

Questions like these could drive a kid from the buckle of the Bible Belt crazy, but it's exactly this and other questions that Beau Jennings, the singer/songwriter soul of Norman, Oklahoma's Cheyenne, poses in the verses and choruses of I Am Haunted, I Am Alive, Cheyenne's debut release on The Record Machine, a label out of Kansas City.

In the hills, rolling plains and frontier atmosphere of Jennings' native Oklahoma he finds his muse, but Beau’s songs aren’t merely tales of Indian natives and over-eager settlers. I Am Haunted’s songs are bridges, character portraits that link the past with the present. In “Believe and Escape,” the album’s weathered, whispering closing track, an soul from a time long past laments unrequited love by means of a murder ballad.

Jennings’ lyrics often hit like clever, ironic punchlines that your best friend might include in a story about a painful breakup. These interspersions match the production perfectly. In Say the Answer Shortly, arguably the best track on the album, Jennings’ questions and observations about life hover over James McAlister’s (Sufjan Stevens, Ester Drang, Pedro the Lion) and Chad Copelin's atmospheric production, including synth pads, hauntingly anemic piano, Brian Wilson-like vocal harmonies, and slide guitar, among other sounds, to create a beautifully painful juxtaposition.

“Juxtaposition” is exactly the word to describe I Am Haunted… Hopeful elegiac laments are followed by rousing train songs, followed by traditional folk ballads, and somewhere in between the ambient synths and the banjo, the murder ballads and the hopeful musings, everything sounds like it belongs there. And it does.

The greatest thing about I Am Haunted… is that the album sounds like Oklahoma. It sounds like the dust bowl depression, the rolling hills, and the western frontier, but it also sounds like the Oklahoma of 2 am truckstop gas pumps, “just-passin’-through”-nomads and local church kids looking past their Bible Belt society while hanging onto their heartland warmth.

This type of thing tends to catch on, so watch out.



Cheyenne - You Were the Sound
Cheyenne - Houses

Buy I Am Haunted, I Am Alive from Insound.com

Buy I Am Haunted, I Am Alive from The Record Machine

posted by paul @ 2:48 PM