The 19th-century folk song “Arkansas Traveler” is as much a part of the Southern landscape as kudzu, red mud, and humidity. Its melody, which has been borrowed by everyone from Charles Ives to Raffi, is simple and playful; you can picture someone playing it on a banjo in a Les Blank movie as easily as you can imagine hearing it spilling from an ice-cream truck’s speakers. Where some songs of its era command a gravitas that makes them feel brittle as parchment, “Arkansas Traveler” can be pulled like taffy in a Gatlinburg candy store window. Some might call it kitsch. But judging by the way they play it on their debut album, Salmon Graveyard see “Arkansas Traveler” the same way John Coltrane saw syrupy tunes by Jerome Kern and Johnny Mercer or Rodgers and Hammerstein: as a high-art gem that just needs a little polish.
Salmon Graveyard is the project of guitarist and electric mandolinist Corey Thuro, a regular in the Baltimore and D.C. improvised music scenes who has collaborated with Matmos’ M.C. Schmidt, among others. The music he and his band play is, in a sense, a countrified form of raga, long improvisations over phrases that repeat relentlessly. Drones have figured in American folk music for centuries—you can probably follow the hum of an open-string fiddle back to the Highlands bagpipe—and artists like Henry Flynt and Pelt have long used bluegrass instruments to make stridently, uncomfortably avant-garde music that’s still recognizably within the lineage of Bill Monroe or the Carters. While Salmon Graveyard are willing to take their explorations to challenging places, the plucky swirl of John Hoegberg’s pedal steel and the nonstop march of Jonah Guiliano’s snare give their music a glossy cosmopolitan feel that has more in common with Western swing. Think of it as Bob Wills gone free jazz.
That approach makes Salmon Graveyard unique in their musical realm: They are fun and easy to listen to. You can dance to them. Thuro’s distorted mandolin and Alani Sugar’s electrified violin wrap and tangle in “Arkansas Traveler,” squeezing the song so hard Hoegberg starts picking his bass like he’s playing hardcore, drawing out harmonics, playfully trying to push the song back open. It’s sprightly in a somewhat neurotic way, like it’s been up for two days, all black coffee and trucker speed. “Peak Bottom,” meanwhile, kicks off the 26-minute two-part composition that forms the center of the album with a long, slow whistle from Hoegberg’s pedal steel, the sound of a bomb dropping in a mid-century cartoon.
