Musically, Freakwater are a country band that flirts with bluegrass and Appalachian mountain music. Thrill Jockey, the independent record label home of jazz experimentalists and post-rockers like Tortoise, has released Freakwater's last four albums. If anything, Freakwater belongs to the early core of alternative country bands like Uncle Tupelo and Souled American, which played rural music without winks and nods of irony. We're not a bluegrass band technically. We've got our own saga to get off our chest.
Full strings sweep behind graceful pedal steel.
And for the first time in the band's career, a drummer accompanies almost every song. As a whole, the extra instrumentation takes the record closer to pure country and further from the stringy bluegrass that appeared on earlier albums. Irwin also writes deeply personal stuff, but she's also willing to step away from herself. As accomplished as all the songwriting is, Freakwater probably wouldn't contain half as much beauty and strange tension if not for the way Bean and Irwin so seamlessly, yet awkwardly, harmonize with one another. It gives the songs, and the women who sing them, a sense of familiarity, a feeling that they have together something that goes beyond friendship and digs into the essence of country and even the folk songs that came before.