Industrial Strength Bluegrass

Industrial Strength Bluegrass is a compilation album that I picked up while the band was on tour. We were milling around north Columbus waiting for our show to start at Dirty Dungarees and we stopped into Records Per Minute, which is a truly lovely little store. Its arresting design, its eye-watering price tag ($17 for a single disc!), and its subheading of “Southwestern Ohio’s Musical Legacy”. I didn’t (and still don’t) have any bluegrass or roots music other than Live at Folsom Prison by Johnny Cash, Why Should The Fire Die by Nickel Creek, and if you count them, Four and Blues Traveler by Blues Traveler. But I can play the mountain dulcimer, and I have been to a square dance or two, so I think I have an OK idea of what to expect out of a bluegrass record.

First and foremost, this is a beautiful looking digipak. The color choices, the black and blue old photographs on the back and interior, the rusted metal pattern on the card beneath the disc itself, all add up to a beautiful end product. My only nitpick is that the thick booklet that comes with it bulges the top of the digipak, breaking up the otherwise clean lines. However, because of the digipak design, that booklet can be a little longer than a normal CD booklet, and pack in more information.

The booklet was pointed out to me by the clerk as something I should check out, and it seems to be the main selling point of this album. It’s 39 pages long. It gives a quick overview of the histories of the artists who originally wrote and recorded the songs in the 1950s and 60s, with some sparse details about the migrants from Kentucky to Ohio and their culture and history. It could have used a bit more cultural color, as it’s mostly a collection of names, dates, radio stations, and steel mills, but it helps ground the CD in a place and a time. It is very clear that it is well-researched, as something released by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings should be.

It’s a shame about the music, though.

When I bought it, I thought I was buying a compilation of original tracks from the mid-20th century Ohio bluegrass scene, but instead it’s a compilation of covers recorded in the midst of the pandemic. You can really tell that it’s a pandemic album by how siloed off each instrument sounds from each other, how squared off and over-quantized some of the rhythms are, and how sterile the overall production feels. There’s not a lot of swing to this thing. The musicians aren’t reacting to each other in that beautiful bluegrass-jam style I was expecting. The takes don’t sound obviously composited, but it was made by very talented people recording their parts rote and sending them into a producer to sum together, and it does suffer a little for it. Very tricky, joyful, clever breaks, but bloodless.

If the vocals had been fine, then the album could have worked. Unfortunately, producer Joe Mullins squashed all the heart and soul out of the recordings. These are freaky, rubbery, de-humanized vocals. They went overboard on the pitch correction and the consonant matching. There’s an obnoxious vocaloid quality to the harmonies in songs like “Readin’, Rightin’, Route 23” and “When He Blessed My Soul”, where all the consonants land at the exact same time, with the exact same inflection, with the smoothest and most unnatural pitch bends. Once you hear it, even the less obvious tracks like “Stone Walls and Steel Bars” and “Garden Tomb” have major autotune artifacts. There’s also only one instrumental track, which means I can’t avoid the singers.

Would I be complaining about the vocals if this were a pop record? I’d be complaining, but probably not as much. I’m more fired up about them because this album presents itself to be a historical document about a gritty people making art out of hard times, and then sandblasts all the emotion out of the vocals. By the time I started hearing artifacts everywhere, my ears then started to distrust everything else about the music. How much quantization did they put on the percussion? Did the fiddle player really play that in one take? The pandemic probably forced a lot of these issues to the fore, and if they had been able to get together in a studio and record it the way the performers they’re honoring here, they might have made for a better album.

The beauty of the songs themselves sometimes forces its way through despite the production. The bluegrass format of embellishing verse and chorus melodies with instrumental breaks forces the tunes to stick, and even the worst tunes are deeply catchy. But when the production is this antithetical to the artform, the earworms produced are not symbiotes, but parasites. In hindsight, I should have been able to guess something labeled Industrial Strength is antithetical to naturalism.

I suppose that in a way, this album achieved its goal in making me aware of the original artists of the Ohio bluegrass scene. But I would have been happier if I could have bought a history book rather than the CD and booklet for $17. This album could have been an email. I don’t want to listen to these Nashville-slick covers, I want to listen to the Ohio Valley originals.

Industrial Strength Bluegrass is a bad album and I don’t like it.