Spider Tales (LP)

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Format: LP Label: Free Dirt Records Year: 2020 Media Condition: New Sleeve/Cover Condition: New TRACKS: A1 Goodbye, Honey, You Call That Gone A2 Roustabout A3 Where Did You Sleep L ast Night A4 Old-Timey Grey Eagle A5 Move, Daniel A6 Blackbird Says To The Crow A7 Brown Skin Baby B1 English Chicken B2 Rocky Road To Dublin B3 The Angels Done Bowed Down B4 Beyond This Wall B5 Boll Weevil B6 Done Gone B7 Mad Mama's Blues PERSONNEL: Jake Blount Tatiana Hargreaves Nic Gareiss Rachel Eddy Haselden Ciaccio Born and raised in Washington, DC, Jake Blount was also a 2020 artist-in-residence at Strathmore in Bethesda, during which time his amazing debut LP was released. Named for Anansi--the great trickster of Akan mythology--Spider Tales features fourteen carefully chosen tracks drawn from Blount's extensive research of Black and Indigenous music of the Chesapeake region. The result is an unprecedented testament to the voices paradoxically obscured yet profoundly ingrained into the Appalachian tradition. With a history of hardship and resistance coded into the music, Spider Tales brings out centuries of visceral feeling refracted again through the lens of Blount's own experience as an LGBTQ activist and key figure in an emerging wave of queer roots musicians. The album's sound is appropriately haunted-spinning through "crooked" instrumental tunes, modal keys, stark songs, and confounding melodic structures-and it's lyrics range from despairing to violent to downright apocalyptic. Blount is joined by his musical peers Tatiana Hargreaves, Nic Gareiss, Rachel Eddy, and Haselden Ciaccio on the album, which was produced by Jeff Claus and Judy Hyman (The Horse Flies). Altogether, Spider Tales is a beautiful, masterfully performed, and thematically intense first statement into the transforming canon of American roots music. Show more