Album Reviews: Nick Jaina and Run On Sentence

[October 8th, 2008]

^Nick Jaina: A Narrow Way (Hush records)

[FOLK LITERATURE] Were Nick Jaina to completely abandon melody and meter, his songs would still hold merit solely on his strength as a writer. Seven albums of exploration into love, sex, religion and death have already established Jaina as one of the Northwest’s foremost songsmiths and with A Narrow Way the troubadour moves dangerously close to matching the intensity of his musical arrangements to the heartbreaking momentum of his storytelling.

A Narrow Way turns its focus to the up-tempo leanings of Jaina’s muse as his five-member backing band, featuring such Portland notables as Nick Langston (the Maybe Happening) and Scott Magee (Loch Lomond), expends its efforts in turning Jaina’s plaintive meditations into apocalyptic hoedowns.

Recorded in single takes at Portland’s Type Foundry studio, the album largely succeeds in distilling the populist energy embodied by Jaina’s Cajun-folk strumming. Tracks like “Fruit on the Vine” and “Battleground” showcase the group’s ability to summon regular bedlam that simmers in the barest of self-imposed restraints.

Though these moments occasionally become more dog-eared than the material calls for, A Narrow Way nonetheless indicates that Jaina is on the cusp of perfecting the increasingly gorgeous marriage between his literary acrobatics and growing acoustic momentum. .

^ Run On Sentence: Oh When the wind comes down (hush records)

[RAMSHACKLE FOLK] At times restrained, often rambling, and seemingly endless in its narrative scope, Run on Sentence’s debut Oh When the Wind Comes Down is a modern-day folk record littered with signposts from the past: Alpine yodeling, Appalachian mountain ballads and a Jeff Magnum-like sense of awe. The work of songwriter Dustin Hamman and a rotating cast of up to 12 friends (including co-producer Nick Jaina), the record begins and ends with two elaborate, complex tales (the “Carrie” and “The Afterlife” suites) and finds room to explore Latin rhythms, odd time signatures, and heaps of first-person storytelling in between.

Oh When the Wind Comes Down is only grounded, then, by Hamman’s voice; whether he’s hitting every high falsetto note or cracking the upper register and testing any unwilling listener’s patience with the yodel-ay-eee-oooo outro in “Carrie Pt. 1,” it’s a profoundly unique aesthetic vision. And, while some parts (the jazzy New Orleans swing of “Stonewall” in particular) take a bit of getting used to, “The Afterlife Pt. 1”—the record’s unquestioned masterpiece—takes any notion of a trope and throws it out the train-car window. Sounding eerily like something off Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, the song condenses every disparate path of Hamman’s songwriting, distilling the crystal-clear melodies into a slow, mournful and timeless ballad. .