Micah Blue Smaldone is a former punk scenester from New England who has moved on to sparse, rootsy folk. The Red River, his fourth solo record, is dominated by meditative, neo-traditional acoustica with an eye for theatre. While intimate in scale it much less personal than, say, Bon Iver, but more focused on the kind of dust-choked cinematics of recent albums by the similarly named Micah P Hinson or Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan, albeit with a less bawdy vocal style. Fans of Will Oldham and Iron & Wine’s sparser material may find much to enjoy in the rusted, bleak atmospherics here. The Thrill Jockey press release tells me Smaldone sounds ‘like a dead man’, which may seem like hyperbole but there is something spectral about the old-time quality of the music. Like a less wildly impressionistic Grizzly Bear, there is a deliberately spooked mood to The Red River - the sense that Smaldone is trying to conjure the ghosts of a past, not just resurrect the music itself. The production quality is as if it was processed through an analogue radio: the skeletal picked guitar, vagabond banjo and viola all sound somehow starched. Continue Reading