Those of you searching for the heir apparent to Micah Blue Smaldone and Ray LaMontagne need look no further than Moses Atwood, Portland’s latest pure, unadulterated talent. He marries Smaldone’s love for Robert Johnson and old-time fingerpicking with LaMontagne’s soulful writing, devoid of irony and crushingly honest, to create a sound that’s hundreds of years old but should wow the pants off the indie crowd over at SPACE when he releases his debut, self-titled full-length this weekend. Remember the first time you heard Damien Rice’s O? That’s it.His debut with a single track on this year’s Cat and Mouse Records sampler had me intrigued, but I was sure I had something here with “The Ballad of Mary,” sitting half-way through the disc. With just a leg slap for rhythm, Atwood proceeds to knock an original gospel number clean out of the park, a capella and naked of any studio tricks, something I haven’t heard on a local disc since Sara Cox tackling “Fater.” Even better, it’s the story of Mary avenging her son’s death after she “sold her body for a gun.” Seriously, it knocked me right over.
It’s not that his vocals are immaculate. They dip and weave from a low bellow to a quivering falsetto, but they never lack emotion and pure pathos, and they’re backed by some of the best guitar playing you’ll hear on a local disc this year, like Mike Golay, but not trying to do as much. The slide resonator on the opening “Woman, Angel, Demon, Child” is a chaotic romp, while the delicate pick of “Octavio” is the perfect foil to Atwood’s insistence that “we are but shadows.”
Not everything here is completely original from whole cloth — “Brooklyn’s Bolinas” is a pretty dead ringer for John Prine’s “Paradise” — but where Atwood draws influence he at least shows great taste. And the record simply sounds great, warm and inviting like apple pie cooling on the windowsill while leaves fall on an autumn day. That’s thanks to David Goodrich, to whose Signature Sounds, in Pomfret, Connecticut, Atwood traveled in May. It was worth every mile.
In “Dolores,” as part of a bluesy acoustic stomp Atwood sings that it’s “been so long since I had a lover/Lord only knows if I’ll ever have another.” Well, he’d better get ready for Portland to embrace him.
On the Web
Moses Atwood: http://www.myspace.com/mosesatwood
