Tobacco City’s version of America smells like diner grease and cheap weed, and it sounds like hope on minimum wage. We’ve all been there, literally or metaphorically, or at least we’ve driven past it in a hurry. It’s the thematic kin of shopping-mall realism like Bobbie Ann Mason’s Coca-Cola laden short stories, where details set like rhinestones place the listener in a particular place and time. It’s not just Andy “Red” PK’s pedal steel or vocal duo Chris Coleslaw and Lexi Goddard’s plaintive twang that makes Horses, the Chicago group’s latest, an effective postcard from the national hinterlands; it’s the transcendental quality of the album’s songs. Tobacco City are blue and surrounded by trash; they are drinking PBRs and determined to find the beauty in it.
Part of the record’s charm is the businesslike way the vocals pair — no runs, no frills, just harmonies and the assertive charm of veteran storytellers. There’s a marked similarity to Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons, a twangy, brassy twining without studio bells or whistles. You can hear the desperation and the defiance at once. Coleslaw and Goddard duet the way people sing along to a beloved song with the windows rolled down. “It was always autumn then/summer on the breeze,” Coleslaw sings on opener “Autumn,” between descriptions of hometown characters in various states of trouble. On “Bougainvillea,” he reminisces, “Ain’t it weird when you’re the young one?/Reckless, stupid, and free/You get in the truck and you don’t look back.” Often, these personas are lost in bacchanalia, channeling divinity through mushrooms or wine or love.
This transcendence feels most visceral on album standout “Time,” whose sinuous opening gives way to an ambling melody backed by rich, warm instrumentals. The shifts from wailed harmonies to a cyclical, picked riff to the wild chirp of a fiddle sound like a reimagining of a song from Music From Big Pink. The eddying instrumentation and the tentative lyrics amble like lovers walking on a summer evening, “watching berries ripen on the vine,” stuck between the frisson of something new and its inevitable decay. “Evening moves in gracefully,” Coleslaw sings, queasily hopeful, “and hovers just beneath divine.”
On “Mr. Wine,” a paean to a liquor store run, there are whiffs of Father John Misty-style drollness until Goddard’s vocals crank the song into its sixth gear. “Bye bye blues,” the pair sing in a jukebox earworm, “Hello Mr. Wine.” There’s nothing winking about the ode to ’70s country cheese, but anyone with sense will be too busy boot-scooting to question the pivot towards goofiness.
