2 out of 5

Label: MIE

Produced by: ?

Mike’s fiddle, Cara’s voice, and some extra additions from Matt Peyton cover the four tracks on one side of this split, with a Gangloff / Patrick Best / Nathan Bowles, Mike Dimmick and Sally Anne Morgan version of Pelt covering the 12-minute song of the B-side. …And in both cases, despite the added roster, you’re getting a very stripped down version of what these musicians otherwise tend to bring.

I admittedly have only listened to Mike’s work in other contexts, but given my underwhelment at the offerings here with his wife, I wanted to check against the other albums they’ve recorded; and they’re pretty damn magnificent. Yes, Mike’s approach and style can vary greatly by project, and I’m sure the same is / has been true of the paired Gangloffs, but for the stuff I listened to… it’s beautiful. Cara’s somewhat flat singing style is set against overwhelming layers of stringed instruments and noise for a type of drone that pushes past its denseness and some of the chaos of that to bring out the beauty in Cara’s voice, and the “traditional” songs the duo approaches. Here, it’s kind of just the instrument(s) and singing, but without the noise; as per my description above, that robs the effectiveness of it, and the stuff just becomes minimalist folk. The two songs included here are definitely pleasant, but neither one is full-on enough to really land: Blind Man’s Lament is on the Black Twig Pickers side of Americana, except without the amped-up pace and crisp production (this stuff is fairly muted), and Someone to Watch Over Me has an interesting hymnal vibe, but it needs more space than its 4-minute runtime to become immersive. The two bookend tracks have some quirky instrumentation squiggles added (theremin!); they’re only 30 seconds each, though, which, again, is hardly enough time to do much with that quirk.

The Pelt song is some degree of raga, some degree of folk; it layers guitar pluckings and strings against a distant, countering stringed instrument, and slowly adds another layer and another, and then it’s 12 minutes and the song ends. It is not a bad mid-album Pelt track between two bigger-scoped barrages; it is also not incredibly remarkable on its own.

Viewing all of these as addendums to an experience (this was a tour-exclusive release, apparently) gives its “extra material”-feel some context, though that does not turn that material into must-own stuff either.