Drunken Barn Dance - album release - 8/27 - Savoy (Ypsilanti)

Michigan’s New York son, singer/songwriter Scott Sellwood revels in a resonant, atmospheric-rock scoped, slight-country-twanged folk style. His strummy skeletal songs are bolstered into rich, reverb-heavy sagas by a quartet of Arbor/Ypsi musicians with commendable resumes: bassist Jim Roll (renowned producer/collaborator), guitarist Greg McIntosh (Great Lakes Mytho Society), guitarist Scott DeRoche (Saturday Looks Good To Me) and Ryan Howard (City Center). What begins as a jangly toe-tapping modest anthem ("Leaving Las Vegas, Reno, Laughlin") gets molded by these psychedelic scraping guitar roars bending and swaying over each other until a caustic feedback underpinning starts simmering underneath.

Drunken Barn Dance songs often start in realms resembling neo-folk ("Ain’t No Weather Fouler") or alt-country ("The Guest List") soon disarm the twang-expectation and stretch into indulgences for maybe a hard-boiled murder ballad or whirlpoolish tear into shimmering shoegaze. Songs may conjure a few indie/arty mid-90’s inclinations be it a dark-ish but rousing acoustic spurred dream-rock (ala maybe a Neutral Milk Hotel) or a spindly, quick tumbling, nasally Beatles-pop narrative (ala maybe, an Olivia Tremor Control) to soaring guitars singing the shuffling of a more pensive, woodsy wandering dirge (ala, maybe, a Neil Young). Each entry was captured within just a few takes, after an indeterminate (but considerable) amount of beers, in a whirlwind 8-hour recording span, laid down live.

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