Country isn’t exactly the genre of the masses in our current day and age. Post-9/11 drawling about big green tractors has been getting dunked on since I started paying attention to music at large, and until last year I’d spent more time listening to literal noise than country. A six-piece from Bend, Oregon however had enough raw charm packed into the album that rebooted their career to change all that.
Larry and His Flask’s “All That We Know” is less a strict country album, and more an alternative rock album played by a variety of bluegrass instruments with a kind of barbershop quartet sentiment sprinkled here and there in the band’s robust use of vocal harmony. In its live show hardened pivot to a brand of folk punk uniquely their own in its overwhelming energeticness the band makes leaps and bounds in quality from the word go.
From the opening strums on “Land of the F(r)ee” the album establishes that it intends to be a rickrollicking worldly adventure through the aesthetics of Americana without sentiment to sugarcoat it. If “Land of the F(r)ee” is a kind of tongue-in-cheek opening image for the album, then track two “Flags and Concrete” is a biting thesis statement about what that image fails to reflect in a modern day America.
Making great use of his raspy voice, lead singer Ian Cook draws in the listener to what “Flags and Concrete” has to say about the cold and indifferent nature of the first world we find ourselves in as well as perhaps tipping the band’s hand about their opinions on the war in Afghanistan. Skimming tracks “No Life” and “Beggars Will Ride,” we find therein some nice songs that lean on the sound of the album before getting to the next lyrical bludgeon.
Track five: “Manifest Destiny” begins on a cool bassline that paves the way for a darkly atmospheric track, the likes of which could easily be called the moodiest on “All That We Know.” Utilizing this dark mood it paints a picture that could variably be about truck driving or illegal border crossing. Practices less grandiose than colonization, but more earnest overall.
The musical interlude at the end of “Manifest Destiny” matches the mellow mismatched lead-in to track six “Blood Drunk”. A rah-rah battle song that in utilizing Norse myth’s Valhalla calls to my mind the greatest Nordic touchstone to the western world: the viking. It seems to me that “Blood Drunk” singles out the meaninglessness of war by indulging in an almost Colonel Kilgore-like voice.
Next we reach the stand-out of the album: “Ebb and Flow.” To date the most popular song by the band, “Ebb and Flow” is home to not only a beautiful ode to the permanence of death, the impermanence of grief in the grand scheme and the title drop, but also a decent encapsulation of the overwhelming passion of a Larry and His Flask live performance.
Energy not only conveyed by the somehow chaotic and cluttered soundscape, but also by the stripped back crowd singing which plays out the track.
Back to back with “West Virginia Chocolate Drop,” a track sung by original lead singer of the band and its current drummer Jamin Marshall, the middle point of “All That We Know” forms my recommendations for tracks to try out to see if Larry and His Flask is to your tastes, but they act as a prelude to a personal favorite on the album.
“End of an Era” is a song of heartbreak, and the cooling ashes of fury over something titular that to me reads as an insightful poem on untenable economic situations which drive out things you love. Be it gentrification driving out the soul of a neighborhood, or need for growth failing to maintain a beloved business. Skipping to “Call It What You Will” we get a more overt message about economics in the form of the band’s condemnation of a kind of mindless consumerism.
Drawing on the same well of heartbreak, the penultimate track “I’ll Be Gone” uses a band’s worth of harmony’s to lament the age old struggle of loving someone (or given the theming perhaps something) that doesn’t want to be loved, before we move into the finale “Slow It Down”.
A closer the likes of which provides contrast to the overall bombast of the rest of “All That We Know” the simple string duet which comprises most of “Slow It Down” truly gets to the heart of what makes an album winddown. With lyrics that seem to allude to the imagery of attending one’s own funeral and a “take it easy attitude” Ian Cook morphs into the image of a bodhisattva as we are left with the life and death which makes up “All That We Know.”