Spins: Buck Curran • One Evening and Other Folk Songs
Buck Curran
One Evening and Other Folk Songs
(ESP-Disk’/Obsolete Recordings)
Singer-songwriter Buck Curran offers the aptly named One Evening and Other Folk Songs as a snapshot of creative evolution since 2020’s No Love is Sorrow. Learned quickly and captured mostly in intuitive live takes in an Italian studio, these psychedelic folk songs find Curran and keyboardist Jodi Pedrali in communion with drummer Dave Barbarossa (Bow Wow Wow, Adam Ant). The tone is intimate, confessional, and troubled. “We can run, but there’s nowhere to hide,” sings Curran on the moonlit “One Evening,” with traces of Wovenhand’s portentous gothic folk. Bassist Roberto Frassini Moneta contributes to the foundation, stepping out on the restless and unsettled “Deep in the Lovin’ Arms of My Babe.” Vocalist Adele Pappalardo takes the lead vocal atop a brooding jazz groove during a reinvention of Scottish-American folk song “Black is the Colour,” rising to a heady crescendo. Sparse instrumental “Sadness” breathes with an arid spaghetti-western twang a la Brokeback. Curran and Pappalardo sing in arresting harmony during the lament “Red Bird.” “Song for Francesco” and “Zitkala-Sa (Song for Shylah)” shift moods into an upbeat samba and tumbling Afro-pop. Performances occasionally get a bit loose, but only enough to know that the musicians are inhabiting the moment and treading uncharted ground together. Additional versions of three songs demonstrate the malleability bundled into Curran’s arrangements and his improvisational spirit. (espbuckcurran.bandcamp.com)
– Jeff Elbel
7 out of 10
Category: Spins
