Those who have any interest in such things will have noticed that a band from Utah called Navigator released one of my favourite albums of 2009, called Bad Children.  Navigator is largely the work of a fellow called Braden McKenna, whose work sprawls far beyond the stuff he releases under the umbrella of Navigator and into all sorts of other mental stuff.

If you go to his homepage you’ll see all kinds of stuff available for free download, including both Bad Children and this fantastic record: Old Mountain Radio by Grizzly Prospector.  It’s hard to tell who is responsible for what work exactly because an awful lot of it sounds, in production style and vocal characteristics, an awful lot like Mr. McKenna himself, although he seems to collaborate with a handful of other people so it’s feasible that some of the bands featured on the page may not be his at all.

On the mp3 tags for this album the composer is credited as being Parker Reese Yates.  That could be one person’s full name or three people’s surnames, you never know with Americans and their enthusiasm for using last names as people first names.  Either way, the short version is that I have no real idea who wrote and recorded this album, although I suspect strongly that Braden J. McKenna was fairly heavily involved.

This is something of a concept album, and I would tentatively suggest that it is something of a tongue-in-cheek one; not a piss-take, just written with a slightly raised eyebrow.  Also, it happens to be completely gorgeous.  The familiar low-fi recording style is strongly in evidence, but with much gentler instrumentation you don’t get anything like the aural battering which a Navigator recording tends to dish out.

In fact, there’s barely anything on this record at all, bar a fragile vocal and gently plucked acoustic guitar.  It’s like some strange cross between Woody Guthrie and Will Oldham, although neither as raucous as the former nor as honeyed as the latter.  The songs are almost impossibly short as well.  Basically, there is no point listening to most of these tracks individually, because the whole record is a start-to-finish meander where there is no real demarcation between songs, more an unhurried train of thought in musical form, which is sometimes beautiful – such as the gorgeous harmonies on Old Mountain Hum – and often so slow that it’s almost stationary.

It’s a bloody brilliant album though.  One which may have been very carefully constructed, but which still gives the impression of having casually drifted off the tip of someone’s tongue one evening and dripped slowly into recorded form in no other order than the one in which it happened to coalesce, like smoke rings drifting in an out of shape against a twilight sky.

Grizzly Prospector – Oh! Grizzly Me! (Slow) (Live)

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Grizzly Prospector – True Love Will Find You in the End

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Download for free from Magic Goat Music.