As Ripley Johnson strips away colleagues and friends, going from the four-piece Wooden Shjips to the two-piece Moon Duo and finally to the solo Rose City Band, so the enjoyment factor seems to increase as if, in reality, this is what he would choose to do.
The effects and washes that layer both Wooden Shjips and Moon Duo have for the most part been removed, and what you are left with here is Ripley’s songwriting, emerging from the coating, gleaming with promise. The album opens with the lines “I wish that I was only lonely / I wish that I was on the road” and that feeling of lust for travelling, for being out in the landscape, seeing and sensing is shot all through the tracks here.
The rambling rhythm and pedal steel of “Only Lonely” have a vagabond air, while the slower lullaby of “Empty Bottles” is more like the soft rocking of a hammock strung in a sunlit glade, the dawning of a new day filtering down to sleepy eyes. The fact that it received a bongolicius transfusion halfway through is testament to the ideas that Ripley is trying out here. He is clearly looking in a country direction, as there is a touch of zydeco in deceptively quick swing of “Real Long Gone”, and it feels as though there is just a tip of the hat to the Everley Brothers in “Morning Light”, but the addition of didgeridoo and train-whistle steel guitar lend it a dry and deserty air. The interesting thing about the album is that it couldn’t be anybody else. Ripley’s voice is a unique instrument, somehow ethereal, but warming like a summer breeze; and even with the songs stripped back, he is unable to prevent them drifting into the distance, a gently picked solo vying with the rhythmic momentum to lend a sun-parched parallel to Wooden Shjips.After the hazey, boogie-ish lilt of “Reno Shuffle”, “Wee Hours” is the closest we come to the Shjips sound, with its loping insistent beat more apparent than before. You can just sit back and allow it to enfold you, and see if you can spot the change of key as it effortlessly segues into the final track “Wildflowers”: “And there’s no-one at home, freedom, in the sun I will roam”. I think this says it all.
Summerlong is about escape, but not about leaving everything behind. It is about the joy of travel for the sake of it, and with the current global predicament, you could do worse than put this on and visit the American wilds from the comfort of your own home.-Mr Olivetti-
