You can forget the 'new' or 'alternative' tags, Canadian sextet
the Guthries get straight to the heart of true, legit country on their debut album
Off Windmill, with particular ghosts of
the Band haunting the music, but also drawing from the twanged hearts of
Patsy Cline,
Loretta Lynn, and
George Jones, among others. There is a real collective, communal vibe to the music. Each member of
the Guthries seems to play a dozen instruments with a cocksure looseness, and they swing like crazy without losing their powerful, beer-fueled wallop, while the three songwriters in the band (Matt Mays, Ruth Minnikin, and Dale Murray) rotate lead vocals. The band can kick up a lot of dirt, as they do on "Suited," a rocked-out lament about the suffocating constriction of straight life, and play honky-tonk drinking and dancing music as on "Trials and Tribulations," but they have enough versatility to lope along at a Laurel Canyon pace as well, which is exactly what "Better Part of an Hour" manages. There is plenty of real-deal, down-on-my luck country given a modern slant (the chorus of "Patsy Cline" wallows that "Patsy Cline is the only one/who could understand/just how I'm feeling tonight"), but
the Guthries also find the soft pop center in the music. The Guthries harbor no pretensions other than to make music full of heart, and if
Off Windmill does one thing exquisitely, it is to show the continuum of human nature, showing that our actions rarely alter dramatically even if the music that expresses them does.The band is reverential of the musical past it holds dear but lives wholly in the present, ultimately exemplifying the truth that, as they sing on "Old Familiar Song," it's "the same as before." Sometimes the same old-same old is a good thing. ~ Stanton Swihart