Rusty String
By cars & trains
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#1 some sort of overture
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#2 the wires from my broken record player
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#3 fake plastic guns
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#4 oh sweet consequence
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#5 beatitudes
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#6 and all of us as well
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#7 painting over it did no good solitary bird
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#8 further from home
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#9 the sky is clear
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#10 the singing will never cease
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#11 nursing 500 broken fingers
With the Rusty String LP, Portland, Oregon based multi-instrumentalist cars & trains (twenty-six year old Tom Filepp) takes a cross-country step closer to the melodic electro-folk he set out to make with the 2006 debut EP, 2 AM. Woodwinds interweave with banjos, trumpets, strings and glockenspiel, fleshing out dynamically engaging song structures. Rusty String sits somewhere between stations on the analog dial, where an old country broadcast breaches into absent-meinded waves of static, synching up as if on purpose.
The album consists of handfuls of microscopic crafted worlds, shaped with tiny precision whiel recording in backwoods Appalachia and soberly urban Boston. The latent energies of those places were captured and realized, mixing solitary rural twange with driving electronic elements. Spiraling off these contrasts, Filepp explores a lot of ground lyrically and through found sound. Songs paint imagery of overgrown grass reaching through cracked sidewalks, hazy suburban childhoods playing not-so-benign games, self hypnosis, and bullet ridden statues standing alone in town squares. Banjo driven four to the floor stompers yield to spacious instrumentals laden with sampled americana. Bursts of orchestral cacophony and found sound then break through to reposition the listener.
Several guest spots add to the character of the album, including Alex Chen of Boy In Static (Mush Records) on viola, and a vocal collaboration with Sole (anticon. records).
Press
Fangbear.com
...Rusty String drifts from atonal to downright pretty, with nimble alacrity. Filepp's vocals brood over brilliantly broken orchestral movements and righteous downtempo breaks.
Popmatters.com | 8.0
Rusty String is a triumphant experiment into what can be donewhen art and technology intertwine, and there is an undeniable joy in seeing the album veer from thumping beats and breakdowns to acoustic plucking and glockenspiels. Regardless of its foundation, it is a delightfully inventive album of fantastic melody and ingenuity that should be commended as much for its songwriting as it should its experimentation.
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