Alexander Tucker - Old Fog

There are two kinds of folk music. There's the folk music of shaggy-haired men and women with acoustic guitars and sugar smiles, platitudes over a pretty tring-ting-ting of chords. And then there's different, darker stuff: a music that emerges from woods and caves, from a folklore of murder and loss. Maybe the practitioners are just as shaggy-haired but there's something more unsteady in their eyes, like they're not going to count their chickens until everything's come home to roost. 'Old Fog' is of course this latter sort of stuff. It's cobwebbed and windy, prickles of mandolin and murmurs of drone thrown over Tucker's lonesome and sighing verses. Songs from an abandoned cottage in the hills, Pelt and Fahey records leaning against a flickering lamp. And the only sugar smiles are the ones rattling in a jar. [Sean Michaels]