Doug Paisley

Doug Paisley
(No Quarter)

The best parts of life are often those unassuming, low-key but beautifully nuanced moments. Sometimes it’s hard to explain these instances in words or describe them, but you know when they happen. I’m thinking maybe the first bird of spring passing across a blue sky with a whistling chirp, for example. That’s the feeling that comes off Doug Paisley’s self-titled debut. There’s a raw honesty and genuine warmth in Paisley’s austere, mellow-down singer/songwriter-style that takes sparse folk and bends it with a country lilt. The London, Ontario-based Paisley and his band draw on a lineage that goes through the Carter Family’s revelatory mountain sound, Neil Young’s plaintive acoustic balladry, the Band’s homespun synthesis of Americana, Townes Van Zandt’s outsider country-blues, and Will Oldham’s modern trailblazing of the old paths. In the last half decade there was a burst of artists who, in a flash of underground music trendspotting, got labeled “freak folk” and “weird old Americana.” Those days have passed, but Paisley wouldn’t have really fit that peg anyway. This record proves he is really, at the core, a great songwriter more than some experimenter with past idiosyncrasies in Western music styles. What he does, he does well. The opener, “What About Us,” is a perfect, organ-driven slice of folk-pop that will undoubtedly bring reminiscences of the aforementioned Young and the Band, The track highlights Paisley’s honeyed tenor and sets the pace for the album’s gentle purveyance of heartstring-pulling and easy melodies. “A Day Is Very Long” works its bouncy amble underpinned with an unmistakable darkness, which ultimately pushes into a grand pop crescendo at the end. “We Weather” is a charming, lovelorn, country ballad with Simone Schmidt’s accompanying vocal and kissed with the ideal touch of pedal steel. “Take Me With You” is a sparse, solemn song of leaving and finality, in which Paisley sings, “Take me with you/Where and when/I don’t want to know.” The song serves as the perfect ending. This is the kind of record you’ll listen through once, take a deep breath, softly sigh, and want to play again. Paisley offers that kind of moment.

—donny kutzbach