Sam Amidon
Album: Lily-O
Label: Nonesuch
Tracks: 10
Website: http://www.samamidon.com

Only last year, Sam released an album (Bright Sunny South) which really hooked me in with its fresh and highly individual take on folk tradition that equally obviously paid that tradition maximum respect from a vantage point of being steeped in that very tradition The album has stayed with me, and grown even more in my affections, so it was with high expectations that I finally managed to get a copy of the followup, Lily-O, and thrust it eagerly onto the cd player.

Lily-O turns out to be another set of masterly "reimaginings" of traditional folk material (apart from one self-penned number, Down The Line), and gains considerable power from magnificently wild and almost wilful unpredictability, while positively bleeding character. It takes the innovative chancing of Bright Sunny South to new levels, with Sam's boldness and daring reaching ever higher places. Sam again utilises two of the musicians who had played on the earlier record (Shahzad Ismaily and Chris Vatalaro), but this time round his principal collaborator is jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, who adds some tremendous playing and brilliant improvisatory touches of his own to Sam's innovative arrangements. And (miraculously) the whole affair was recorded in a mere four days in a Reykjavik studio by producer Valgeir Sigurösson (who's previously worked with Björk, and indeed with Sam himself on a couple of his earlier albums).

The togetherness of this little group of musicians is extraordinary, and on each of the songs they conjure through supremely responsive, highly creative interplay an organic development that matches that of the narrative. Nowhere is this more striking than the central ballad Lily-O itself, whose onward progress is charted through a series of layered textural treatments and builds where imagination both drives and reacts to the storyline, never quite going where the listener expects yet by the end of the track feeling entirely natural in retrospect. At the outset of the whole record, though, on Walkin' Boss, we get no immediate surprises with the opening banjo riff; but then a jittery percussion part ushers in Sam's cracked vocal and a forceful bass line, before the gritty tale disintegrates into a tumbling percussion melange. Down The Line follows, pitting Sam's rasping vocal against Bill's seriously heady, ultra-dissonant guitar grunge, located in a kind of haunted, feedback-drenched Dead-meets-Morrison territory up in the Appalachians - and I'm still not sure I can actually decipher those lyrics now! To echo the desolation of the protagonists' journey, Blue Mountain sports some grindingly keening fiddle swooning over the gentle guitar drone and some weird syncopated beats that sound like hi-fi typewriter keys from the analog generation. There's Sam once again a-pickin' on the banjo for Pat Do This, Pat Do That, with a railroad rhythm motoring along down the track at the back; similarly, Groundhog Variations proves a comparatively straightforward transposition of an old-timey number but with some more typically quirky Amidon twists and turns along the way. In comparison, the impassioned, hoarse-throated lilt of Won't Turn Back is almost lyrical, if not "amazingly-graceful" (tho' I can't quite reconcile the jazz piano coda); this one's almost a companion piece to Your Lone Journey, a starkly scored parting-song of truly desolate beauty. Maid Lamenting stretches out its heart-rending scenario in a jewel-like jazz setting whose brevity belies its implied emotional depth; finally, the disc's swansong, Devotion, is an expansive, relaxed treatment of a sacred harp hymn.

This reflective winding-down of the final third of the disc brings Sam's own devotion to the cause into clear focus; even so, Sam's very personal way with a song can sometimes render a text more enigmatic than perhaps it is in a literal sense - an impression that's boosted by the pervasive vibe of sheer atmosphere that sound-surrounds the whole disc. Whatever, it's ultimately very, very inspirational, all adding up to a totally original-sounding tradition-based record that really has no equal.

David Kidman