| It’s not every day you hear something as fresh and familiar as Cabinessence. Call it what you will — psychedelic country, Pet Sounds meets Sweetheart of the Rodeo, plantation art-rock, “Glam Parsons” — It’s not country, but it’s not exactly not country, either. Rising from the ashes of Springfield’s stillborn power-pop outfit Marigold (Outpost Records), Jacob Arnold and Nathan Maricle have grown up, embraced their inner Merle Haggard and put together an alt-country band that would make Marc Bolan (T. Rex) proud. Drawing liberally from the varied textures of pop, folk, rock and country music, the sound is as familiar as it is invigorating, and with nods to every nook and cranny in the American pop music pantheon, it’s every record geek’s wet dream.
But it’s not all nostalgia. This time around, Arnold and Maricle have enlisted the help of multi-instrumentalist David Pulliam, a jazz guitarist who convincingly evokes a circa-1970 Nashville studio player with work on Hammond organ, electric piano, electric guitar and pedal steel.
Putting together a do-it-yourself album track by track, piece by piece, was no easy task. The story of “Comes Back To You” is full of happy accidents and impromptu performances. The album has an organic feel, not at all surprising considering its birth in a one-bedroom house in west Eugene. On one track, “It Won’t Be Long,” Arnold remembers starting to record and “two hours later we had this massive, breathing, ball of sound.” Surprised at how the song recording had taken on a life of its own, they decided to record an organ track on top of everything. “We didn’t have a long enough headphone cable, so I routed it through the stereo and turned it up real loud,” Arnold explains. “We hit record and everything started feeding back ever so slightly, but we didn’t realize it until we listened to it later. That one track is what gives the whole song that swirling ambience; we couldn’t have planned it in a million years.”
It’s a pretty apt description of the music: tough to describe and impossible to account for, but undeniably fun to listen to. |
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