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about this album
THE MAG A genuinely unique voice, Adam Gnade is something of a travelling minstrel, trailing his "talking songs" of bleak lives, bleaker landscapes and hard drinking across lengthy tours of the US and the UK, gathering critical acclaim and writing a number of books and albums along the way. The latest additions to this prolific catalogue is this 2 CD set released through small US indie Bad Drone Media. The ying to the others yang, these are two markedly different sets in terms of both content and delivery. First up, Palaces - a bleak, self-recorded record full of unsettling noise loops, tentative guitar plucks and a wasted set of vocals are unsettling and dark, like the alternative folk soundtrack to a David Lynch movie. As with most of Gnade's songs, the plots are bleak, the lost and the wasted of the world, cast out upon the winds of humankind and struggling to hold onto the precipice. By comparison, Whidbey Island is a far more laid back affair; spacious folk and country guitars roll themselves out on the sun porch and take in a little easy time. Yes, it's still pretty downbeat but compared to the nightmarish sections of Palaces it's like a copy of Spiceworld! It's possible that the influence of David Christian (credited here as a co-conspirator) had a lot to do with this, perhaps coaxing the pessimist out into the light for a short time at least but back to back - the two albums work as a whole. Like the spring sunshine the morning after the storm the night before, whe
