Download Sam Amidon I See The Sign Rar
Singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Sam Amidon is a contemporary folk musician who often peppers his albums with traditional tunes alongside his original compositions. (Two of his most celebrated releases, 2007's All Is Well and 2010's I See the Sign, were entirely comprised of folk standards, with the exception of one tune by R.
Kelly on the latter.) Possessing a voice that's gentle but evocative, Amidon's style is usually spare and atmospheric, focusing on acoustic instruments and a style that insinuates rather than speaking boldly, though 2017's The Following Mountain found him branching out, writing all the material and working with veteran jazz musicians to create a darker and more experimental vision.Samuel Tear, aka Sam Amidon, began playing fiddle at the age of three. Raised by musician parents on a steady diet of Irish and Appalachian folk in Brattleboro, Vermont, Amidon spent the early arc of his teens performing and recording traditional dance and avant folk music with his parents, as well as his own group, Assembly. He added banjo and guitar to his repertoire after relocating to New York City, where he began collaborating with longtime friend Thomas Bartlett (Doveman), as well as a host of other acts like Tall Firs, the Swell Season, and Stares. He released his debut album, Solo Fiddle, in 2003, followed in 2007 by But This Chicken Proved Falsehearted and All Is Well in 2008. Amidon married singer/songwriter Beth Orton and the two had a son in 2011.
Amidon's output remained strong as he entered into family life, with new volumes arriving in the form of 2009's duet with percussionist Aaron Siegel, Fiddle and Drum, 2010's I See the Sign, and for Nonesuch, 2013's Bright Sunny South and 2014's Lily-O. The latter featured guitar legend Bill Frisell. In 2015, But This Chicken Proved Falsehearted was reissued in an expanded edition from Omnivore Records after years out of print. His first album to consist entirely of original songs, The Following Mountain arrived via Nonesuch in 2017. It was produced by Leo Abrahams (Regina Spektor, Frightened Rabbit) and featured guests including veteran jazz drummer Milford Graves. When Ancienne Belgique in Brussels, Belgium presented an exhibit honoring Harry Smith's groundbreaking collection The Anthology of American Folk Music, they invited Amidon to perform a concert devoted to songs from the set.
Amidon and Shahzad Ismaily booked a two-day session in a London studio to record some of the songs they worked up for the event, resulting in a four-song EP, Fatal Flower Garden (A Tribute to Harry Smith), that was released in November 2019. James Christopher Monger. Modern folksinger Sam Amidon's sound is an eternally open-hearted one, with optimism coming through in even the most desperate of his tunes. With Bright Sunny South, Amidon continues his trend of reworking and rearranging mostly traditional folk tunes, translating their rustic tones into a richly orchestrated, indie, chamber pop language and in a way, extending their journey of being passed down through the generations. The songs are lovely to begin with, masterfully selected from an endless canon of obscure mountain ballads and country hymns, but Amidon's pristine arrangements are the voice of the album, often brimming with unexpected shifts and subtleties.
'He's Taken My Feet' is a prime example, beginning with a spare guitar and voice, slowly joined by hints of trumpet, understated fretless bass, and other elements until the song, very gradually, grows to a burning climax of dissonant guitars, synths, and explosive drums. It sneaks up out of nowhere, as do many of the gentler arrangements.
And as much as Jason Molina's vocals sounded like a dead ringer for Will Oldham on the earliest Songs: Ohia records, Amidon sounds almost startlingly like Molina on tunes like 'Short Life' and 'Pharaoh.' The strengths of Amidon's albums are their vivid clarity, with lush arrangements and colorful choices of instrumentation breathing new life into dusty old songs. The hollering web of throaty vocals, banjo, and steadfast drums on 'As I Roved Out' is great evidence of this gift, as he approaches the meandering story song with a fresh-faced perspective. As with many of Amidon's other albums, his take on a more contemporary R&B number is slipped in among the traditional public domain material. This time it's a ghostly rendition of Mariah Carey's 'Shake It Off.'
Stripped of rhythm, sass, bounce, and all but a sorrowful croon and slight piano, the song takes on a truly heartbroken feel. Bright Sunny South doesn't stray too far from Amidon's previous work, but still suggests his development in its gorgeous production, increasingly deft arrangements, and a general sense of greater confidence and vision throughout the record. Fred Thomas.
Despite howling 'I'm out of ideas' to open one of its tracks, The Following Mountain marks a notable change in approach for musical raconteur Sam Amidon. After establishing himself over the course of several albums as a reinterpreter of traditional folk tunes, this is his first record to consist entirely of original songs. He began the recording process with a largely improvised session with legendary jazz drummer Milford Graves, Jimi Hendrix percussionist Juma Sultan, and saxophonist Sam Gendel, along with frequent collaborator Shahzad Ismaily. He then met with producer Leo Abrahams (Regina Spektor, Paolo Nutini) to build songs out of segments of those recordings, with Amidon on occasion borrowing from public domain poems and songs for lyrics.
('Warren,' for example, contains lyrics from a 17th century poem by Thomas Flatman). By nature of its creative process, the album has a more meandering character than much of his prior material, but still renders Amidon's ramshackle, instinctive-sounding style and elemental arrangements, which can make synthesizers and programming seem downright rustic in context ('Another Story Told'). Contributing to this impression are pre- and post-song studio clatter and commentary. 'Juma Mountain' opens with the subtle hum of electronics before acoustic guitar, congas, bass, and eventually atmospheric electric guitar and drum kit set a sentimental mood as Amidon contemplates a moment in time. 'Gendel in 5' is busier, with - as indicated by the title - complex time signatures and an extended saxophone solo dotted by harmonic passages built from voice, flutes, acoustic guitar, and synths.
It maintains a reflective, almost haunting tone. The album does take a turn on the final track, 'April,' which consists of the final nearly 12 minutes of the initial hour-long jam session.
In the liner notes, Amidon wrote of the song, 'It's where we got to.' With the possible exception of that improvisation, by combining his appreciation of both free jazz and Appalachian folk music, Amidon seems to be creating a traditional folk for the future. Marcy Donelson. Sam Amidon and Thomas Bartlett break away from the sweet indie pop of their Doveman work and instead explore traditional folk.
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On their collaborative debut, But This Chicken Proved Falsehearted, a sad, pretty record that moves effortlessly from slow indie rock to folk, they cover old field songs - as well as a Tears for Fears track, 'Head Over Heels' - with a touching sensitivity. Sometimes the duo sticks more closely to the original arrangement and instrumentation, with the necessary emphatic banjos, picked acoustic guitars, and twanged vocals, like on the rollicking 'Rocky Island,' the broken love of 'Falsehearted Chicken,' or the bluesy 'Another Man Done Gone' (which Johnny Cash performed a cappella), but more often they add instruments - Wurlitzer, electric guitar, organ, accordion - to give a fuller, more contemporary, and often more melancholic sound to the pieces. While the Mississippi John Hurt cover, 'Louis Collins,' is certainly sad when played by the bluesman on his acoustic guitar, Amidon has such longing in his voice that, when paired with Bartlett's simple drums and the sustained organ chords, the line 'The angels laid him awake/Laid him six feet under the clay' becomes one of desperation and pain rather than redemption and hope. Amidon and Bartlett's power lies in their subtlety, how they layer without overstating, keeping the integrity of the original while bringing on something of the modern.
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Even the (very few) times that a distorted electric guitar comes in, like in 'True Born Sons of Levi' - in which Amidon's tenor cracks marvelously - it doesn't overpower the rest of the song; it only works to emphasize the emotion already there. The tracks are reinterpreted but not reinvented, respecting the craft of the writers while still allowing for creative adaptation. Sam Amidon and Thomas Bartlett breathe new life into old and sometimes forgotten songs, which ends up making But This Chicken Proved Falsehearted a fantastic listen. Marisa Brown. Samamidon's second album and first for Bedroom Community, All Is Well is, at its core, a very pleasant modern folk album filled with interpretations of older public domain standards, with Sam Amidon's ruminative voice and steady playing not in and of itself immediately unique.
A song like 'Saro,' with its truly lovely arrangement and Amidon's stellar performance, however inevitably his vocal style suggests but does not replicate Nick Drake's, is justification for its release as it stands. However, there's a calm drive at the heart of many of his songs that shows why he's been affiliated with the world of low-key dance experiments as much as anything else, as songs like 'Sugar Baby' show. 'Little Johnny Brown' is one of the apotheoses of this album's approach, with a variety of sympathetic guests, including Ben Frost on programming and Eyvind Kang on murky viola shading, creating a counterbalance between folk roots and something starkly modern that resembles a slightly more smooth Long Fin Killie, tense and mysterious. Meanwhile, 'Wedding Dress' is as sweet a straightforward amble as it could be, Amidon's banjo playing as notable as his guitar work, while 'O Death,' if even more straightforward in terms his singing, has its melody played like a minimal mantra, heavily echoed and moved forward in the mix, a contrast that makes Amidon sound like he's almost singing through the instruments. It's a small touch but an effective one. Ned Raggett.
Sam Amidon's idea of recomposition- of excavating Appalachian folksongs; rearranging, repurposing, and creating a dissociation that feels uniquely contemporary- isn't exactly unprecedented. Musicians- like A.P.
Carter, who scrambled up and down Clinch Mountain in the late 1920s, collecting local songs for the Carter Family's repertoire- have been reinventing folk songs since before we knew to call them folk songs. That's part of what folk music is, and does. What separates Amidon from the scrum of revivalists and archivists is how modern these renditions are. I See the Sign, Amidon's third folk LP, doesn't contain any original tracks, but his interpretations are so singular that it stops mattering how (or if) these songs existed before- all that matters is how they exist now.Amidon grew up singing folk music in Brattleboro, Vermont; his parents were members of the Word of Mouth chorus, a community choir which performed sacred harp hymns in the 1970s. Culturally, folk music is inextricably linked to the south (and Appalachia in particular), but rural Vermont has birthed its fair share of traditional strummers (pick up Margaret MacArthur's Folksongs of Vermont for an impeccable primer). Amidon inhabits these songs comfortably, with an ease that belies a childhood spent with a fiddle in one hand and a banjo in the other.Much of I See the Sign's success can be chalked up to its arrangements, which are fractured and frequently off-kilter; Amidon and his cabal of collaborators- Nico Muhly, Ben Frost, Shahzad Ismaily- have been merging chamber music with indie rock for awhile now (see also: Sufjan Stevens, Thomas Bartlett, Owen Pallett, Bryce and Aaron Dessner of the National), and their touch is nuanced and, on occasion, delightfully odd. Bits of percussion, distorted bursts of Moog, and hits of celesta pop up and recede, snapping into place like puzzle pieces.
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The arrangements are never bombastic (unlike what happens when, say, a pop artist gets paired with a philharmonic)- instead, they're violent (the stabbing bass and scuttling percussion of opener 'Here Come That Blood') or stiff and lonely (the restrained electric guitar and puffs of strings on 'I See the Sign'). On 'You Better Mind', Amidon, harmonizing with Beth Orton, gets backup from threatening squeals of strings: 'You've got to give an account of the judgment, you better mind,' they caution. Their voices are grave, concerned.As a vocalist, Amidon is preternaturally calm, and his flat repetition of certain couplets ('Found my lost sheep,' 'Loose horse in the valley') feels mesmeric and mantra-like.
He's poised, but never cold, and I See the Sign can play like a gospel record, with all the attendant modes and lessons. These are songs to live by (or in), and these iterations- despite their sophistication, despite his stoicism- never feel like museum pieces or anything less than functional.The only non-traditional track here is a cover of R. Kelly's 'Relief'. On paper, the choice feels a little like a trap (R. Kelly fills an odd role for overeducated indie rockers), or at least a posture- and while it could be didactic or a lame grasp at irony, Amidon's rendition is stunning.
'What a relief to know that/ The war is over,' he and Orton sing, their voices earnest and tough, rising over the album's thickest, most optimistic swells. When Amidon finds an affirmation of faith- 'What a relief to know that/ There's an angel in the sky,' he sings, grateful- it's hard not to feel that liberation deep down in your gut.
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