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Ralph White sings a world unto himself. At times terrifying, playful, stoic and passionate, the multi-instrumentalist upends roots with squawking, understated moan and wail. Swirling in layered loops of fiddle, banjo, kalimba, and accordion, White’s tunes are mesmerizing in their raw, off-beat dexterity as the former Bad Liver continues to prove himself one of Austin’s most unique musical visionaries. Primarily based on ragged banjo with the tinkling clip of overlayed kalimba, White melds the plucked virtuosity and world reach of Sandy Bull with the cataclysmic daring Eugene Chadbourne, yet it’s his harrowing vocals that always remain the primary draw and most visceral element of the tunes.
Though only featuring one original White tune among the six, The Mongrel’s Hoard is distinctively wrought. There is timeless quality to everything that White touches, as if pulled from some trance-like, otherworldy séance, so his opening version of Blind Lemon’s “See That My Grave is Kept Clean” strikes with a completely authentic, yet re-imagined intensity. The interwoven fiddle and kalimba lines, braced by a banjo rhythm and a punch of accordion, all swells with a miasmic direness like spirits called up from somewhere well beyond reach. The powerful pull of mortality strikes on par with Johnny Cash’s posthumous take on “Ain’t No Grave,” the song fraught in the creak of White’s torqued high keen.
Likewise, the crack of White’s voice as he bemoans the title line in the chorus of “When I’m Gonna Learn,” tortures a regret that can sound both celebratory and distressed. The song, originally by the Aboriginal rhythmic rockers Coloured Stone, is given an almost Celtic flair with White’s fiddle, and Appalachian pine through his voice. Meanwhile, his version on Pink Floyd’s “Fat Old Sun” strips the delicate tune down to its essence of fading loss and natural nostalgia. It offers White at his most subdued and tender, the kalimba thumbed with an ethereal air.
The traditional “Little Birdie” plays out a pliant tuning of banjo against fiddle, a low roll that flurries in the dynamic fluctuation, and closer “The Bramble and the Rose” develops the British folk tune atop a dew dripping kalimba backdrop with winding fiddle. The inherently eerie call of White’s naturally lamenting voice softens in the earnestness of the sentiment that White draws from the songs.
In this spirit, the original “Western Country” lays well among the unlikely pairings that populate The Mongrel’s Hoard. The song strikes at once deeply personal and abidingly universal, White’s oddly phrased delivery unfurled across lines that seem to linger as half thoughts, unresolved: “If I had said all the things I wanted to say to you that day, the other day; read all the signs I saw instead of walkin’ away….” The “if only” reflection never concludes, and that seems important to White’s interpretations not only the songs here, but his world as reflected in his work. Everything collects in pieces, sounds culled from distant or remote or forgotten corners and invoked to re-imagine familiar tunes, and draw the obscure into a timeless familiarity. So White’s musical vision is not a question of achieving that conclusiveness, or even of alternate possibilities wrapped in his reworkings, but rather the inherently heard interconnectedness that is continuous, and continuously unbinding.
Websites:
www.ralphewhite.com
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