Monday, June 6, 2011

Pokey LaFarge / Pack It Up



For the last year or so, Third Man has been pouring out brilliant 7” singles from an incredibly diverse range of artists. Jack White deserves a hell of a lot more praise from finding artists from so many different locations, genres, and levels of success. Anyway, recently I’ve been really excited by Pokey LaFarge’s addition to the Third Man singles collection. LaFarge, hailing from St. Louis, sounds like the celebration of traditional America as we know it from movies and stories from American history textbooks circa high school. It’s so distant and almost confusing in a time where music has become something temporary, something that has to defy everything else happening at the moment, something that creates a new sound with an influx of trendy bands to follow. LaFarge has a sound that is timeless and almost isolated from a music industry that feasts on the wires of the world wide web. Even his biography reads like the tale of a hero from some film based on a younger America. LaFarge doesn’t simply settle for being incredibly unique at a time when everyone else is trying so hard; he is also exceptionally talented, carrying terrific effortless vocals and an immaculate talent for song writing. His old school traditional American blue grass that carries imagery of lazy rivers and folks swing dancing late at night in the town pub is probably the punkest, most bad ass thing I’ve heard from any musician in the last decade. The upbeat B-side of LaFarge’s new single, Pack it Up, opens with a sweet little guitar rhythm that gets swept up with LaFarge’s modest vocals met by wonderful harmonies during the chorus. It’s all carried by the rhythm of a stand up base and becomes perfect with LaFarge’s epic guitar solo towards the end. Pokey LaFarge; the punkest thing in America.

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