Sunday, August 12, 2018

Musik Korner

REVIEW: "Two For The Trail" - Steed & The Stetstones
By Stib Tidmarsh, special to The Kreation Korner

I first had occasion to encounter Steed Stetson at the Cavern Tavern in Nampa, October 2015. He was not on the roster of the poets reading that night under the dimly-lit stalactites. Nobody even knew he was there, so far as I could tell. He simply moseyed up to the mic after the scheduled program concluded and recited some free verse with the stony countenance one would expect from the Intermountain West's most elusive cowboy poet. It seemed that just as soon as he had said his piece he vanished from our midst, as if he had drifted off in the changing winds. A profound silence like an alkaline flat at dawn fell upon the room for what felt like minutes before the din of garrulous poetry enthusiasts and clanking domestic beer bottles began to once again pervade the subterranean chamber. In all my dumbfoundedness at breathing the same stale air of the legend himself, I was unable to remember any of the specific words Mr. Stetson uttered. But his tones, his rhythm, his percussive elements have lingered with me ever since. Steed's work is music, pure and simple. Imagine my excitement, then, nearly three years later when I learned he had recorded some actual music. I suppose it was the natural progression that his chansons would someday be put on wax with the accompaniment of instruments. Like his poetry, the couplet of songs he has created with production by Chris Peebles are as bewildering as they are captivating and evade easy classification. I can see the critics pigeonholing Steed & The Stetstones' musical exploits as nothing more than your garden-variety anti-ballads of the Cowfusion microgenre within Psychoamerica. While I am loathe to shoehorn peerless, multi-faceted talents into narrow categories, I suppose, if pressed, I would say Steed's first foray into recorded music is more emblematic of the nascent Saddlecore movement, a yoctogenre of Tumblewave -- itself a picogenre under the Cowfusion umbrella. In a mere two tracks, the Stetstones have served us a dense portion of tuneful tiramisu that will take years to fully consume and digest layer by layer. Perhaps we will never know the genre. 6.5/10


No comments: