FLAC / Lossless / Log (100%) / Cue
Label/Cat#: Team Love Records
Country: USA
Year: January 14, 2014
Genre: americana
Format: CD


 






Oh Susanna
Tuesday Morning 10:00 a.m.
Living is Dying
Pear Tree
Rumi's Field
Do You Leave the Light On?
Last Summer
Moving On
Trying to Feel at Home
Magpies at Sunset
Dock My Boat

The more banjos the better. That’s the case made by The Lowest Pair on their new album. 36¢ is the debut from the folksy duo of Kendl Winter and Palmer T. Lee. They made 36¢ sitting across from each other in a room, without tracking instruments and vocals separately. It was recorded and engineered by Dave Simonett, a fellow bluegrass player and member of Trampled By Turtles. The result is an intimacy that’s startlingly. 36¢ tackles harmonies and minimalist strings with flair and wit.

With their cotton flannel and baseball hats, Winter and Lee look like hippie organic farmers. Come to find out, they both have a penchant for growing things, whether it’s Lee’s multiple gardens in Minneapolis or the sprouts that Winter grows in the back of the tour bus. It’s no surprise then that their album lauds the pastoral life with songs like “Pear Tree,” which compares love and sex to the life of a pear tree, and “Trying To Feel At Home,” which laments the drudgery of city life and its constrictions on harvesting raspberries and Orange Kush.

The album’s naturalistic themes go hand-in-hand with big existential topics about death and one’s purpose in life. Lyrics about growing old aren’t always taken so seriously though, such as on “Dock My Boat” in which Winter names all the things she’s planning to see in death: “There’s thirteen turtles, four cats, three guinea pigs, and a bird. Oh and that’s my best friend, Sam.” Sometimes it sounds like Orange Kush was being passed in those writing sessions as they came up with this secular interpretation of “In the Sweet By-and-By.”