alt-country

Thomas Dollbaum writes about in-betweens: watching TV, catching rabbits, sitting on rooftops, plotting an exit from a Podunk town that the songs already suspect won’t happen. Birds of Paradise moves through Florida’s pine flatwoods and the backroads feeding the interstate, and it’s preoccupied with the sights and sounds of the American South: coyotes in the yard, birds flying south, discount cigarettes.

Some of these are short stories more than songs. “Big Boi” recounts an ugly encounter with a fractious couple who need the narrator’s help scoring drugs. “Waterbirds” belongs to someone who needs proper rest and wants to be useful to someone else, and isn’t sure he can manage either: “I always wanted to help / But it doesn’t mean I’m good at it.”

Dollbaum is a writerly songwriter, indebted to David Berman in the way he can deliver a devastating line without raising his voice. Berman’s ghost has been loud in this corner of music for a while now, and Dollbaum is squarely in it. The lyrics point as much to Southern gothic fiction as to any record, with Bill Callahan’s habit of letting one specific image hold a whole song somewhere in the mix too. The other touchstone is MJ Lenderman, who turns up on drums and backing vocals plus a ragged solo on “Dozen Roses.” The album was tracked live in four days, which you can hear in the looseness—it’s all the better for it.

The “cowboy punks” tag has been following National Photo Committee around, and it fits: all the instrumentation and song structure of a typical Americana band, with the slacker attitude turned up a few notches. The analogue is Tiberius’s farm emo; a genre tag self-applied with enough wink to deflect, accurate enough to stick.

The Chicago four-piece describe themselves on Bandcamp as a band “that sounds like they grew up in Virginia and got kicked out of college in Olympia,” which was enough to make me play the album immediately. The David Berman influence is everywhere, and perhaps it’s just the corner of music I’m currently in, but his ghost is loud right now. You can hear it in Max Bottner’s double entendres and wry lines delivered with a perfectly straight face. At one point a phone goes off mid-song and nobody seems bothered. Bottner’s deep baritone does most of the storytelling. The richness of his voice makes him sound older than his years, and you eagerly sit round and listen to what he has to say.

This sort of thing usually comes across as half-arsed or throwaway. Red Hot Photo Committee is neither. It’s a polished, serious record delivered with a glint in its eye and no small amount of swagger.