A Country Western Self-Titled Album
September 19th 2023
A Country Western released their first album in May, 2020. The then three person band from Philadelphia were exploring a new sound through production. They pushed the limits of many indie generated genres, sounds, and melodies that are familiar. Websites like rateyourmusic.com and the spotify algorithms have defined A Country Western as slowcore, Lo-fi, slacker rock, indie-rock, bedroom pop, and shoegaze. When all of these genres are used to demonstrate one band it becomes muddy. The seven tracks on this self-titled album are sonically distinct. They have developed a new genre of all of these sub-genres. In each song on the album, you can find hints of the genres that correlate with A Country Westerns descriptions online but they all hold something unique as well. Sonically, the band is using recording techniques, instrumentation and new found sounds to apply this abstract and different element to the album.
The first song on the seven track album is titled “Mussel.” The album starts off with a heavy four stroke guitar layered with a sliding melody. When the lyrics come in the instrumentation gets quieter and you hear the words “Why do I start with a slight delay?/Do I Seem okay?” In every song on this album the lyrics almost fill a space, not necessarily giving meaning to the song. The song ends abruptly and a backwards guitar track plays for about 30 seconds. A theme across this album is to end a song with something that doesn’t match the rest of the music. “Mussel,” “Voicemail,” “On Edge,” and “Good,” do this specifically; it speaks to the genre Lo-fi. You could compare it to bands like Duster, Whatever Dad, or Coma Cinema with one difference, at the time the band was sending audio clips back and forth because of quarantine. They were barely together in the creation of this album. Making music in different rooms and converting WAV files from one DAW to the next changes the sound of Lo-fi and makes A Country Western’s tracks unique.
From an interview on WXPN by Samantha Sullivan, the guitarist and vocalist of A Country Western, Derek Henegemihle, addressed their practice for making music while never being in the same room: “That was one of the ones we wrote by literally texting each other WAV files. Garrett (drummer, guitarist) would mix something on Garageband or Logic and send it to me. I would download it from the text message convo and put it into Ableton, and add on to it. That one was cool, it was all Garrett.”
The only instrumental song on the album is the third song, titled, “In The Waiting Room” Being an instrumental song the track doesn’t take away from the album; it adds something valuable to the full story and plays as an interlude to the album. “In The Waiting Room” forces the listener to create their own narrative. I think A Country Western is also trying to exemplify a song that would play or be listened to in a waiting room. It feels as if I could sit in an uncomfortable chair and listen to this song over and over again but feel content in waiting for whatever it is I'm waiting for. The track also doesn’t peak, it starts and stops. Keeping repetition at the forefront of this track, the band makes a turn towards ambient music here. Without the lack
of a beat like a typical ambient song, this song instead seemingly creates an atmosphere, soundscape, and calmness unlike any other ambient track.
I wanna bring the track “SlugShot” into the conversation. One of the more popular tracks from this album. In the same interview I mentioned before from WXPN, they discuss “SlugShot.”:
“TK(interviewer): Going back to the self-titled, “SlugShot” is one of my favorite songs. Can you tell me about what was going on in your life when you wrote it?
GM(drummer, guitarist): I wrote that song in this room that I had in the apartment before the place that I live with him now. That place had no fucking windows, and I was just by myself at the beginning of quarantine.”
“SlugShot '' is the most meaningful lyric wise, but still that doesn’t say much. “All alone in the country/Lost my phone, it's a monthly/You can tell I'm a deadbeat/Wish I cared who just left me.” These lyrics feel stand still, I now picture Garrett sitting alone in that windowless room writing this song. The drop C guitar in this track mixed with the light drums create a slowcore sound but I think what a lot of slowcore music usually has, like Mazzy Star or Slowdive, is vocals that sound more dreamy while A Country Western has tried something else. In the interview, Derek Henegemihle talks about how Garrett pitched his voice down on this track. “Oh, well, it’s hard to tell. We like to pitch our voice down and fuck with it. Or we’ll play the track, record it a step higher than it would be, then transpose it all down, then record the vocals in the transposed version.”
The last track on the album “Good” feels like it takes me on a physical journey. The song begins with an almost circular moving sound that grows and then gets quiet when the lead guitar comes in. This moving sound feels like a tram, above the city, going through tunnels. It takes me to a different place. As if I’m listening to this song on my headphones while I wait to get off at the next stop. Throughout the song you also hear little beeps in the background, creating an atmosphere of sorts. The song only consists of four lines repeated twice. Once with drums, once without. When listening to other music, I find it easy to critique repetitiveness when I want to hear something new. But because this album as a whole feels so new I don’t wish for it here. The end of “Good” goes back to the tram-like sound again and a male voice comes in that seems to be talking about a computer, data, minutes. As the voice drops out, an acoustic guitar melody comes in and I sink in my seat on this imaginary tram. The album left me with a special melancholy kind of sadness.
