Released at the tail end of last year, Unseen Course kind of got lost amidst the host of Christmas releases and end of year lists which tend to dominate December. Of course, it’s now the tail end of February and we are only now getting down to writing about it and for that we offer our apologies as it’s an album which has been a keen listen recently.
Stereo Naked are a Cologne based band with a flexible line up arranged around core members, Julia Zech (late of Fierce Flowers) and Pierce Black. They play a modern hybrid of bluegrass, country and folk with Zech on banjo with Black on double bass while they share vocals and harmonise quite wonderfully. This is immediately apparent on the almost acapella opening song Dive Right In where the voices dominate on a soulful, almost gospel like finger popping arrangement. It’s the most pared back number on the disc as the remainder finds the pair’s playing embellished with guitar, pedal steel, percussion, strings and horns allowing for a full band sound.
While the banjo driven numbers, Would You and Love Song Nr. 3 certainly can be considered as a form of bluegrass, much of the album heads into into different territory with a contemporary mix of quirky upbeat numbers such as Sanity (“Let’s dance like chickens with our heads cut off,”) and mellower, almost jazz like, ballads. On Old Solo, they turn in a chilling seaborne folk song which creaks and wheezes with authenticity in a manner reminiscent of Anna & Elizabeth. They also have great fun on the closing song, Take The Money And Run. It’s a cowboy ballad given a full cartoon like makeover and a cinch for inclusion on the soundtrack if the Coen Brothers ever decide to film another ironic Western movie. Overall, Unseen Course is a delightful album, airy for the most part with Black’s supple and inventive double bass playing ensuring the songs don’t float away into the ether.