Vibes of all the important ‘him and hers of rootsy back porch Americana’ flicker across this slow-burning beauty from The Glass Hours, demanding rapt attention.

YOUR CALL

You know how many reviews begin or end with the byline “if you like so and so, you’ll love this“? Well, this is one of those, except I’m going to leave you hanging on to quite whose audience this duo are targeting, intentionally or otherwise. It may well become obvious.

HOMESPUN DUST

Megan Barbera and Brad Armstrong, The Glass Hours, are from, respectively, Colorado and Alabama. This is their third release together. Their music tends toward the home-spun and acoustic, where voices, separately and in harmony, are the essential dressing to the rootsy melodies. Here, the ten songs were recorded with the duo in the same room, sitting and facing each other. In real time, a small but selective cast of backing musicians played in the room next door, the whole recording done and dusted, literally, as in maybe dustied, in two days short of a week.

SKINTIGHT VOCAL HARMONIES

The set opens over a briskly revolving pattern of amplified acoustic guitars, two of them, with some lithe acoustic sounding bass and brushed drums discreetly tucked in behind. Skintight vocals kick in, the male and female harmony of the main protagonists, and we’re off. The song is Adaline and it is a song that graces along with precision. Already there are vibes of a slightly more muscular Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, more in the sense of the rhythm section than the central performance.

Matt Patton (Drive-by Truckers) on bass, and Jason Lucia, on drums. apply emphatic underlining to Man Who Had Everything, one of those precision 4:4 lopes that is perfect bed for the maudlin melancholia that Barbera and Armstrong weave above. The chickaboom of North canters up next, a lively celebration of a song, the harmonies as on point as can be possible. I’m liking this. The understated electric guitar work, mainly Armstrong, is lithe and loops along like a lively puppy.

CONTEMPLATION DIALLED DOWN

Not Your Ordinary Heart dials further down the contemplative mood, with the languorous chapel organ of Baxter Arender rendering the mood ever more longing. Who needs happy when sad sounds this damn good? Intermingling picked guitars bring Barbera to the fore, she taking the verses for Colorado, ahead her dusty shadow kicking in alongside for the extended chorus. As the lazy strum and brush of In The Morning kicks in, any thoughts of heatwave or football have long since been left behind, in the long grass, forgotten.

There’s slow and there’s slower, but Providence is then barely upright, a searingly gorgeous reflection that has you recalibrating any preconceived speeds of the sound of loneliness. Lucia provides percussion and extends more attention to the silences over the beats, the song the lonesome moan of a condemned man. As each very rare cymbal clashes, it is the sound of a loosed neck breaking. After that, there is nowhere further down, so that the duo then lurch into the babbling banjo bob of In The Pines. But just don’t go expecting anything too upbeat, that not really their bag, it’s all relative.

THAT GOOD

What did I say, as You Set The Sun is then just so darn brisk as to befit the slowest chug on an early to mid Burrito’s release. Or am I thinking Gram and Emmylou, realising that I am, I really am. It really is, and I mean the singing, the construction and the song, that good. The album rounding off and out with the title track, it is a good a taster of their style as any, an aide-memoire that captures, oddly, a sense of immediacy absent much before. The admonishing organ tones are back, and dally with some unexpectedly lively guitar licks. “Doctor, can you help me“, Barbera and Armstrong plead, and Jackson Browne’s eye condition comes immediately to mind. Nothing much like any of the songs before, it is still the perfect synopsis.

SNEAKY

This is a sneaky old record that you might not always alight on by chance. But, if you do, you sure as hell won’t regret it and, I guess, like me, be wanting to tell all your chums. Here’s a stripped back acoustic version of that title track:

The Glass Hours: Website

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