Georgias Horse - The Mammoth Sessions

1. Shepherd
2. Bloom
3. As It Stops Raining
4. Summer’s Ending Evenings
5. Snake & Sparrow
6. Mammoth
7. Alakazam!
8. Erzulie Dantor
9. Exit Earth
10. Baron Samedi
11. The Man
12. TZSOTVOFASB
13. Bugg Super Love song

Texas is a graveyard and The Lone Star State is full of ghosts. Out on the road to Old El Paso lies the Rattlesnake Bomber Base near a town called Peyote. Once the home of fleets of B29 bombers and the plane called Enola Gay as well as many thousands of military personnel, it now stands empty. The only tenants are lizards and snakes. Even the rusted and rotted hulks of planes have been carted off by junk men and souvenir hunters. The roar of the war effort has been replaced by the whisper of the wind. A gentle absence of action. This is just one of several thousand abandoned settlements or ghost towns in the West Texan desert but the haunted Americana of georgia’s Horse sounds like it could have come from any of them.

Their debut album ‘The Mammoth Sessions’ is redolent of sun-baked vacant lots, cracked runways, drifting tumble weed and dull orange rust. This collection of songs all sound like the aftermath of some emotionally violent event that has just left stillness and melancholia in its place. There are echoes of the (ex pat) Americana of The New Pornographers, a light dusting of the folk psychedelia of Smog and the torrid and threatening country death songs of PJ Harvey’s ‘To Bring You My Love’.

These 13 songs are anchored round the skewed and magnetic vision of singer/songwriter Teresa Maldonado and their brittle and skeletal songs are fleshed out by multi-instrumentalist Tiziano Hernandez (bass/guitars), Brad Thomason (drums) and Melly Rose (cello). But that’s not to say that this recording sounds like it was handled by some kind of your mother’s your brother, lives in a barn hillman. One of many stand out tracks, ‘Snake & Sparrow’, creaks and echoes as if recorded in a haunted house, on haunted equipment. And the title track briefly effloresces violently as if the ghost of the Enola Gay were bringing its terrible cargo home, before returning to gentleness once more. From the most basic of set ups, a deeply affecting and subtle beauty is achieved...www.firerecords.com