If your life is fluted wrist bones / if your life is cursed . . .
WELL, we don't get mailbox surprises like this everyday. A 36-minute burst of bare-bones folk/blues perfection. A string of words that'll stop you cold and then keep you warm for days on end.
An accomplished painter and poet, Shorthand P. Davis lives in Muncie, Indiana, with his wife and son. His music traces a path back to Woodie Guthrie with a rough-hewn delta vibe, and the man knows to embrace the technology at hand and record himself with fierce DIY gusto. He records with a minimum of equipment: a couple of guitars, toy keyboards, a beat-up microphone, a harmonica. Good Enough's Sharpie-scribble artwork pays homage to his trusty MT100 cassette 4-track recorder. (Get me Yamaha on the phone and I'll insist they include a copy of Good Enough with every machine.) As with contemporaries East River Pipe and Mountain Goats, the songs transcend their minimal production values, and every sonic element stands out like bright steel.
The feel is loose, the songcraft tight, the melodies are whistle-all-day-long. Short Hand describes it as "knowing that youre not out for a blockbuster (and even if you were, you'd have to be lucky enough to win some kind of cosmic lottery like Dylan or Hank Williams or Roger Miller). Youre just trying to get as close as possible to the thing you do."
But what keeps us hitting the "repeat" button? It's the arresting Folk Implosion-ish groove of the title track, an outsider anthem if ever there was. It's the painterly harmonica & keyboard duet in the sublime chorus to "The Best of the Swing Years." It's a guitar solo that trips and stutters along before trailing off with a sly virtuosic flourish. It's the heartache of an aging rock-and-roller weighing the disappointments and simple pleasures of domesticity: a Kermit & Fozzie on-the-road love letter ("Super Plush Hotel"), a cruel awakening to infidelity ("Two-Part Word"), a warm tribute to married life, despite its "yards and yards of minor scars / both our in-laws and all their flaws" ("Number One"). It's the loneliness of a cold dawn after a sleepless night ("Sit Right Down") and the haunting failure of "Smuggled Love": "The things I couldn't say / are a thin box of nails."
Good Enough is an evocation of nostalgia and regret, a balance of light and dark. You'll wonder how Short Hand can say so much with so little. We're still wondering why it's the only thing we feel like listening to.
Is your body made of miracles? / Is your body made of light?
CDREVIEWS.com: "From the hand-drawn cassette tape on the album art to the scrap-paper immediacy of the lyrics, Shorthand P. Davis puts a sense of one-man craft into each song. You can hear the 4-track cassette queues. You can hear the crackle of the sisal-fiber chair as Shorthand leans forward after a track. The baleful popping static is like that of a record needle. Perhaps, as with good poetry, all of this soft detail adds to the mood of the work, making these sparse songs stand out beyond their simplicity and lyricism....
"For some reason, “Everybody Knows” plays like a super-8 vicarious family memory. As with the entire album, evocative imagery reigns. In this case, I see a shirtless child, walking through a sun-blind, dry-morning wheat field chasing grasshoppers…but in retrospect and slightly slowed. Why? I don’t know. The melancholic groove pervades, like a low-fi bootleg between Cat Stevens and Townes Van Zandt....
"... Shorthand P. Davis has assembled music from the heart while maintaining enough vague, sideways eclecticism to steer clear of the maudlin in favor of the universal, under-spoken line. Simple lines suggesting shape. Shapes suggesting volumes. Volumes suggesting space."
SMOTHER.NET: (Editor's Pick) "... nicely textured lo-fi folk-blues rock experiment appropriately named Good Enough. It may never be perfect but its damn well good enough. Hipster folk kids and their brethren in the anti-folk circuit will really latch onto this."
DELUSIONS OF ADEQUACY: "Short Hand's Good Enough is a great example of just how perfectly imperfect a home-grown recording can be.... This guy isn't just some coffeehouse crooner with a guitar - he's nostalgic and modern as well as minimalist and complex, and he has a unique voice that is sometimes gravelly and sometimes slight.... Despite the spare, modest approach of Good Enough, Short Hand's songs are sharp and have quite a bit of bite....
"Although do-it-yourself recordings don't appeal to everyone, Short Hand is so endearing that it's hard to put this disc down. Off-kilter folk fans with a taste for unusual approaches to making music will find a lot to like scattered among this musician's minimalist approach, especially in relation to the lyrics."
INMYHEADPHONES.COM: "Good Enough is at once experimental, eclectic and above all addictive, showing the dedicated listener the rewards that can be reaped from innovative music.... [F]or those who appreciate when good hooks can meet intelligent songwriting in an indie-minimalist setting, Shorthand's album can't be beat."
Hey, Shorthand! I received your CDs already, and I'm fuckin' enjoyin' them right now. Thanks big time and hurrah for lo-fi! Salamat from the Philippines!!!
Jr. Greene from Mississippi will play the blues for yall! I'm currently in the top 100 unsigned blues musicians for the state of Mississippi. I love you all and appreciate all the support. Send more fans my way. I'm at "The Shed" in Ocean Springs, MS, phone 228-875-9590
for directions and more details. I love ya'll. Jr. Greene.
This cd is quite excellent. And I've also been enjoying Hitler's Mustache as I pick it up now and then. If these regular profile comments had kudos the same way that blogs have kudes, I would give you two.
Also, your class was pretty cool, and I actually just found out that one of the poems from one of the in class writing sessions is going to be published in January. (It's sort of a wussy poem, but, hey, that's the one they picked.)
