Joe Garner

I had no idea the mountains held this type of beauty. After all, it’s the popular city scenes that lend us the best that music has to offer, not the bare cabins lofted somewhere in the hills above us. Yet some of this year’s best singer/songwriter efforts come from the Appalachian grounds of the Carolinas and Tennessee – with Joe Garner’s Mourning Birds as the latest demonstration.

This mountain minstrel is not unlike Tyler Ramsey, guitarist for Band of Horses who released his own stunning acoustic debut at the turn of ’08 entitled A Long Dream About Swimming in the Sea. Utilizing minimal piano, slight horns and minimal percussion to back the simplistic acoustic arrangements up front, Garner majors on Americana roots of specific time, person and place to spin his personal stories. It’s a time-worn formula and it’s one that Garner utilizes well.

Mourning Birds deceives in its EP packaging – its five songs add up to 33 minutes, giving you an idea of the artistry you’re in for. Garner is an artist willing to allow his lyrics to linger and the music to slowly build. His slow picking style belies his words on “Bury The Hatchet”: “I’m driving like I have some place to be.” It’s clear that, sonically speaking, Garner doesn’t have to be any place in particular and therein lies the album’s beauty.

On the opening track, “Bury The Hatchet,” Garner’s sincere falsetto hits perfectly for the bedroom music he creates. The song can, at first listen, come across as a light-hearted relational tune, but if there’s any light here, it’s only that of the past: “It seems you left some things / Some maybe that you never meant to bring / And they keep me in the night / And wake me every morning / I need to bury this hatchet fast before it buries me…” Garner’s memories are sweetly swept up by the undertow of the waves breaking through at song’s end.

“June and God” silences the listener mid-album, an eight minute acoustic opus of sorts delivering an incredible emotional charge amidst swirling, sparse piano notes and Garner’s plaintive guitar. The difference on this tune, besides the ideal imagery provided by Garner’s autumnal lyricism, is the singer’s best vocal performance. It’s here that he allows himself to crawl out from the normal, whispery delivery into a full-hearted cry in a song about a man delivering the same sort of cry to to the heavens, toward the title characers. The song is easily the album’s highlight.

Album closer “They’re All Gone” evokes Teddy Thompson comparisons with Garner’s sight drawl adding a sincere, down-home feeling to the haunting title words which repeat again and again. The slight ambient atmosphere provided enhance the eerieness without losing the album’s overall rootsy feel.

While it’s almost silly to make sweeping declarative statements at this point – it’s only an EP! – the material offered here is such a tremendous first step that seeing Joe Garner as a career artist is no stretch at all. Mourning Birds succeeds in every way a debut should.

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