Dylan LeBlanc: Paupers Field (Rough Trade)

 |   |  1 min read

Dylan LeBlanc: Changing of the Seasons
Dylan LeBlanc: Paupers Field (Rough Trade)

From the understated openers with their gentle backbeat, soft organ and steel guitar, LeBlanc -- barely 21, out of Louisiana -- announces himself as part of a long lineage which stretches back to the country-soul out of Muscle Shoals studio (where his dad  was a session musician) and the country-rock of the early Band, but which also reaches to more contemporary names such as Jim James (of My Morning Jacket) and Will “Bonnie Prince Billy” Oldham’s more recent albums.

There’s a world-weariness in some of these songs (If the Creek Don’t Rise with Emmylou Harris) and his backstory of booze, coke, pills and rehab means he grew up fast and hard, and has much to be weary about.

That is captured in the slow, croaked Ain’t Too Good at Losing (“I think too much in the morning . . . I can’t run . . . I give up”) and the finger-picking/banjo-backed Changing of the Seasons (“You can say I’ve been around the block”). But musically these songs mostly occupy a languid dreamworld where alt.folk and country-soul sit on a bed of humid pedal steel and conjure up warm bayou nights over a bottle of local liquor.

If this debut lacks a killer punch it is all of a piece, and he populates his songs with sketched-in characters as much as himself.

A slow grower.


Share It

Your Comments

post a comment

More from this section   Music at Elsewhere articles index

JessB: Feels Like Home (digital outlets)

JessB: Feels Like Home (digital outlets)

It is perhaps unusual and maybe even unseemly that a man of a certain age (plus a decade or more) should be so taken with a young woman rapper. But from the first... > Read more

Jenny Hval: The Practice of Love (Sacred Bones/digital outlets)

Jenny Hval: The Practice of Love (Sacred Bones/digital outlets)

Norwegian multi-discipline artist (novelist, songwriter, sonic experimenter, collaborator) Jenny Hval is – like Laurie Anderson – someone who melds the spoken and sung word with unusual... > Read more

Elsewhere at Elsewhere

Various Artists: The Rough Guide to Psychedelic Bollywood (Rough Guide/Southbound)

Various Artists: The Rough Guide to Psychedelic Bollywood (Rough Guide/Southbound)

We've made the point previously with The Rough Guide to Psychedelic Africa -- and ignored The Rough Guide to Latin Psychedelia  on these grounds -- that this usually reliable label is a bit... > Read more

STEPPENWOLF: LIVE, CONSIDERED (1970): More but not necessarily better

STEPPENWOLF: LIVE, CONSIDERED (1970): More but not necessarily better

Of the very few people I know who have Steppenwolf albums, none have any other than the three I have owned: their self-titled debut (which featured Sookie Sookie, Born to be Wild and The Pusher);... > Read more