Buster Sledge - Nice Time On Earth Today [CD]

<p>Nice Time on Earth Today, the third full-length release from the Oslo-based Norwegian American Sadgrass wonder-group Buster Sledge, runs the gamut of both American folk and popular music styles. Though in this way the musical backdrop is continuously shifting, the text is always up-front and delivered via a hummable melody. Moments of reckless abandon and maximalism explode through unexpected chord changes, grandiose arrangements and wild solos while the backdrop remains tightly knitted and controlled-but not too much of anything of course! Balancing aesthetics is core to the artistic agenda of this band. The title of the album captures with a tongue in the cheek the modus operandi of their lyrical style, a sort of bluegrass/folk-inspired dark humor and levity (e.g. sad lyrics in a happy-sounding song) where the narrator seems to be suffering but also to view themselves suffering with an ironic distance, let's call it stoic melancholicana, and ideally with leave you with a couple verbal and sonic things to reflect on.<br> <br> Buster Sledge is an acoustic chamber-quartet of four voices, fiddle, banjo, guitar and contrabass fronted by a Californian living in Norway and backed by three Norwegians of diverse musical backgrounds, all with a shared love for traditional American music. The band creates a contemporary twist on music steeped in tradition through an original repertoire of music that brings the structure and pop-esque melodic focus of American old-time fiddle music as well as the lyrical meter and storytelling focus of old mountain-ballads and country songs together with modern harmonic and lyrical elements from rap, pop and jazz. These are some of the ways the group engages with the age-old tradition of recycling paraphrased archetypes into a new generation of expressions.