Customer Reviews

Ten Thousand

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Not as good as Fighting and Onions, the groups second album, but still amazing. Only bad thing about loving this band is that they never seem to tour the US. They are #1 on my bucket list of bands to see.

It took exactly 18 seconds of the opening track, `Go Back Home', for this album to put some deep hoodoo on me and I've been bewitched ever since - so much so that it became the soundtrack to my summer in 2008, the songs accompanying dreary weekends of damp camping, long days spent staring out of the window at the rain, travelling all the way to the Czech republic and back, with me trying to preach this gospel to anyone that would listen.

Meanwhile, the band toured Britain, playing a handful of dates, a few festivals, recorded their second session for Mark Lamarr's BBC Radio 2 show, and then buggered off back home to Canada. If you've caught them play live then you're already a convert. Me, I missed them, but I did feel moved to grow a beard and buy a five string banjo. I've now lost the beard, but the banjo still sounds sweet. All of which goes some way to explaining why this review is horrendously late. Or maybe it's just that it is the music that moves us the most that is the hardest to articulate.

Despite appearances, Pete Balkwill, (drums, percussion), Bob Keelaghan, (guitars and vocals), Judd Palmer, (guitar, banjo, harmonica, vocals) and Vlad Sobolewski, (upright bass, vocals, trombone), aren't mountain-men, don't sing gospel and aren't a choir, but instead produce some of the most authentic North American roots music that I've heard in long time.

Formed in 2001, this is their third album, but their first to be simultaneously released on a UK label. They have a sound that shares with the later albums of Tom Waits the thunderstorm crash, rattle, thump and buzz of homemade percussion, and that winged-eel-fingerling, low slide-guitar thing of Captain Beefheart's Magic Band on tracks like `Owed to Alex' and `Floppy Boot Stomp' but this is because their music draws its inspiration from the same roots.

Featuring mostly original numbers, and three covers; `Stop That Thing', by Sleepy John Estes, `La Valse De Balfa, a Cajun tune by Dewey Balfa, with the banjo taking the place of the traditional Zydeco accordion, and `Empire State Express' by Eddie Son House, but with re-written lyrics, a homage to one of the founding fathers and originators of Mississippi delta country blues, and obviously a major inspiration for the Agnostics, who display with their own numbers a clear understanding of the blues as dance music as well the collective expression of desire or despair.

However, this is not just a blues album, despite their cover of a Son House song and his portrait adorning the `Hell bank note' featured on the artwork, since it's clear that the Agnostic's are just as much in love with the music of the early Mountain string bands, long dead artists from the 1920's and 1930's, like Uncle Dave Macon, Earl Johnson, or Ernest V. Stoneman that inspired the pioneers of Bluegrass like Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs, and the Stanley Brothers.

Regardless of all these historical references, the Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir have managed to create something which is both true to the spirit and intensity of the music that has inspired them, while at the same time quite unique and original. This is an album packed with absolute killer tracks, beginning with the foot stomping, hollering, humming and growling thump of `Go Back Home' all the way through to the sheer magic of the closing, title song, '10,000 years, racing at a breakneck pace and sounding like Ralph Stanley singing along to Ali Farke Toure on guitar and some amphetamine fuelled banjo player, while the drummer beats out the rhythm on kettledrums and a pint glass full of old cutlery. Absolutely marvellous!