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T.G. Olson, The Rough Embrace: Providence on the Wind

t.g. olson the rough embrace vinyl and cover

Vocalist/guitarist Tanner “T.G.” Olson of Across Tundras initially self-released The Rough Embrace (review here) last year as a name-your-price download, and the newer vinyl edition of the album — pressed to 150 copies in a swampy kind of green and black swirl on a 150g platter with an obscure, almost runic, front cover and skull-and-hourglass memento mori on back — has a very complementary feel. For example, the record itself doesn’t come with a tracklist. And while one might make out the words “Rough” and “Embrace” on the top and bottom lines of the front cover, there’s little else by which it might be identified, unless you count the title etched into the part of each side after the music has ended.

That’s also how one tells the difference initially between the five-song side A, which begins with “Fool’s Gold Miner,” and the four-song side B, which begins with the moody “Uncharted Depths.” Clearly the intent is that if they want it bad enough, the listener — who no doubt bought the thing off Bandcamp to start with — should go there to get the appropriate information on the recording, mixing, mastering, tracklisting, lyrics, etc., and in reality that’s not a problem. It does give The Rough Embrace something of an artifact feel, though, which is fitting with the name of Olson‘s label, Electric Relics — also the title of the last Across Tundras album (review here), the gatefold 12″ version of which was the first release for the imprint — and also suits the music itself, which is nothing if not classically minded.

Like most folk singers of the last half-century, Olson has had moments in his work where he is almost singularly indebted to Bob Dylan, but neither he nor Woody Guthrie nor Neil Young are necessarily defining influences, and even as “Wars of Bygone Days” marches in tune to the established notions of a protest song — right down to lyrical plays on “manifest destiny” and the notion of using Christian ideals to justify sin (i.e. murder in war) — it retains an experimentalist feel. That, taken in balance with the intimacy of the performance throughout — Olson plays guitar, organ, piano, percussion, does all the vocals, and also recorded, mixed and handled the artwork himself, while Mikey Allred (also of Across Tundras) mastered — is what comes to make The Rough Embrace such an engaging listen despite a superficial simplicity.

Heard on one level, its guy-and-guitar singer-songwriterism seems easy enough to grasp, but that just can’t account for the intertwined echoing lead lines of the sweetly wistful “Sleeper Lines” or the psych-folk vibe of “To Hell You Ride,” which follows and shifts into bouts of more fervent strumming in its chorus. Olson, who has done plenty of balladeering the last several years while also retaining a penchant for droning out on offerings like 2015’s The Wandering Protagonist (review here) and 2013’s sprawling The Complete Blood Meridian for Electric Drone Guitar (review here), keeps more to the former on The Rough Embrace, but even in the subdued nostalgia of “Providence Gone Again,” the underlying organ provides a constancy of tone to complement the guitar that speaks to the other impulse.

It’s range, either way, and that range continues to expand on side B as “Uncharted Depths” gives the album’s shorter second half a quiet launch, lyrics held back until about the halfway mark and then more spoken than sung, the electric guitar ramble very much at the fore. A darker atmosphere is set, but “Out on the Fringes” has a more hopeful spirit, and no doubt it’s on purpose that the one arrives paired with the other. What they have in common is being resoundingly immersive, such that while just seven minutes between them, the more lyrical focus of the penultimate “Birdsong Chorus at Dawn” arrives almost as a surprise.

Would be wrong to call it jarring, but Olson brings the vocals forward again and recalls side A memorable cuts like “Fool’s Gold Miner” and “Wars of Bygone Days” to give side B a landing point; it’s something that, listening to the digital version one might not fully appreciate, but that the vinyl really brings out. That song is a highlight, and “Something Left to Save,” which follows, is very much a closer, a goodbye song that finds Olson singing along to himself, adding a last bit of drums and finishing with a rising drone and sample of what sounds like waves that provides a concluding wash that’s all the more gorgeous for being unanticipated. It’s one more moment that, though Olson‘s work is fluid to the point of having its own current system, is worth taking specific note of, since ultimately its from these things that the depths of his atmospherics are cast. The Rough Embrace offers plenty of those moments, but it’s the whole experience of how they’re strung together that makes it really shine.

T.G. Olson, The Rough Embrace (2014/2015)

Across Tundras on Thee Facebooks

The Rough Embrace on Bandcamp

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