Austin Cash - "All Over Alabama"
Released January 7th, 2020
Austin Cash’s All Over Alabama is a sprawling example of ambient country music’s sonic potential. Co-produced and recorded by Eric Witthans of Homestead Recording (Jordan Moser, Nick Shoulders, Royal Forest), this album is a concentrated meditation on the rural textures of Southern life and terrain, constructed thru modulating and repeating segments of lap steel, Rhodes, harmonica, piano, and guitar. Its two tracks garner inspiration from a road trip made with Cash’s brother through Alabama, and from the words of James Agee from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: “there can be more beauty and more deep wonder in the standings and spacings of mute furnishings on a bare floor between the squaring bourns of walls than in any music ever made…”
At points stark, at others vast, All Over Alabama calls into itself the stories of a churning countryside rife for inspection beyond cliche or stigma. A lonesome deliberation, this ambient americana album ruminates on the perspectives of both the gentle, nostalgic southerner, and unfamiliar or critical outsider, someone who is unknowing, yet curious of this particular culture. Austin Cash’s lush, spacious, and gentle designs regarding the palatial views of an area fraught with political nuance create a sense of wonder for the barbed wire, the cow, the broken farm, the gas station, the wide sky, and the things that create the simple, strange magic that many call home.