Sonic experimenter Joe Grass is originally from Moncton, but for the past two decades has been the go-to collaborator for everyone from the Barr Brothers to Patrick Watson to Lhasa. He has a lush and lovely approach, working with rich melodies and lots of gorgeous sounds, many of them unconventional but always ear-pleasing. He coaxes delicate burbles and fragile textures out of his guitars and matches them with woodwinds, strings, harmonies, and more, to make simple tunes go to surprising places.
For Falcon's Heart, Grass wrote 10 basic folk-country numbers, and then let the magic take over when the rest of the players got involved. For a pretty standard country song like "E. Absolute," there's pedal steel, but it's far more ethereal than you'd hear from Nashville, the backing singers more angelic. And Grass has the emotional gravitas in his own voice that makes this tune, and all of them, touching and haunting. "Guadalupe" starts off as Appalachian folk, with a banjo-like plucking, but it goes full-on Peter Gabriel World music, with driving percussion, Caribbean, Indian and African flavours, and funky bass things happening.
Each song is packed with such curious and fascinating combinations, for the most part melodic and comforting, except for some lead guitar squonking at the end of "Hart Island," to shake us briefly out of our reverie. Do you want a final, overall description? How about country songs played on rock and classical instruments with a jazz approach, featuring old-time melodies made with 21st-century recording techniques? It's all that, and a boatload of beautiful.
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