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Sounds Like Fall
- Avg user rating:
Out of 15 votes - Similar Artists: Iron & Wine, Hayden, Wilco, Uncle Tupelo, Will Oldham
Out of 15 votes
- Location: Iowa, United States
- Genre: Folk » Folk Singer-Songwriter
Editor's review
Country tunes are about two things: lost love and the lap steel guitar that laments it. Joe Young doesn't get much fancier than that on his stunning solo debut LP, "The Wolf Is At The Door," recorded under the Sounds Like Fall moniker. The former Moonshine Radio frontman evokes the windswept prairie spirit with all the deep resonance of a '40s folk hero.
Biography
Sounds Like Fall Yer Bird Records - www.yerbird.com
Joe Young, a fixture on the Midwest indie-folk circuit for years as the lead singer for Ames, Iowa’s seminal fire & brimstone country-rockers Moonshine Radio, has crafted a solo debut both majestic and intimate. Sounds Like Fall, the recorded word of Joe Young, opens The Wolf is at the Door with an apocalyptic lullaby, ‘Ugly World,’ then weaves deftly from the grit of a rural-America Hayden to the off-kilter country of M. Ward via Townes Van Zandt, occasionally drifting into the darker territory of the mighty Magnolia Electric Co. Most fascinating is that he came by this sound honestly - raised on the Louvin Brothers, Ralph Stanley and Jimmy Martin, Joe Young’s modern approach to songwriting is deeply rooted in rural folk songs and early country music. The culmination of that upbringing is that there’s not even a hint of the usual alt-country irony on The Wolf is at the Door - it’s an unaffected, disctinctly honest distillation of both the desolation of the rural Midwest and the ever-encroaching world surrounding it.
The album, recorded in April 2005, retains the organic quality of the sessions while augmenting them with both restrained electric instrumentation and vintage steel guitar (provided by Iowa old-timer Dean Thompson). The sweeping ‘Dust Pile’ - which would beautifully start off Side B if Yer Bird was to press the album on vinyl - is carried along by Young’s earthy, nuanced vocals and the transcendant swell of distant steel guitar. The track begins the album’s transformation from world-weary meditation to, ultimately, redemptive understanding.
Joe Young has imbued the album with is, to us, staggering. As an album whose over-arching theme is one of coming to grips with the hardships of the world, it seems only fitting that the release date was within days of the birth of his first child.
The Wolf is at the Door is at times both subtle and at others immediately engaging, and we at Yer Bird think this makes for an album that would appeal to both those new to the indie-folk scene through Iron & Wine, and wizened old Uncle Tupelo fans alike.
