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Home > Austin Music Source > Archives > 2009 > May > 22 > Entry
CD review: The Belleville Outfit ‘Time to Stand’
(The Belleville Outfit at Shady Grove in 2008. From left: Jeff Brown, Conner Forsyth, Rob Teter, Phoebe Hunt, Marshall Hood, and Jon Konya. Photo by Tammy Perez/For the American-Statesman)
The Belleville Outfit
‘Time to Stand’
(Self-released)
B+
The Belleville Outfit urgently declares its mission statement against a crescendo of stuttering bluegrass swing: “So listen with your gleaming ears, all who walk our broken land,” lead vocalist Phoebe Hunt sings imperviously as the title track’s cascading piano and fiddle duel. “You’ve crawled, you’ve walked, you’ve run away, but now it’s time to stand.” Empowerment snowballs. Clearly building on momentum from last year’s promising debut, “Wanderin’,” this rapidly rising local sextet now forcefully puts pedal to metal.
Velocity rarely wavers. “Time to Stand,” a joyous collection measuring equal parts youthful bravado and cautious hindsight, resonates almost start to finish. Its trump card: electrifying ambition. Kamikaze fretwork boosts both complex arrangements (“Nothing’s Too Good for My Baby,” “Outside Looking Out”) and easier fits (“Let Me Go,” “Flying On”). The spring-loaded group’s effortless interplay makes it nearly incomprehensible that it formed less than two years ago.
Listen for occasional flashes of narrative and poetic depth. Sharply cut lines particularly mushroom “Two Days of Darkness” and “Once and for All” from snapshots into screenplays. “It can catch you in a funny way, like a rainy day or a ricochet,” songwriter and guitarist Robert Teter sings on the latter. “And leave you fallen on your face or blind. All I need is solid ground, but all I see is sand around.” Peel that imagery straight off John Hiatt’s back porch.
Unfortunately, it’s not aces across the board. The serviceable but largely unremarkable ballads — “Love Me Like I Love You,” “She Went Away” and “Will This End in Tears” — slightly dilute the album’s collective potency. Let’s forgive and forget. The Belleville Outfit’s unwavering adventurousness fades missteps to black, spotlighting instead high water marks like Teter’s immediately familiar “Safe.” Count on that melody alone to score plenty of new fans next month at Bonnaroo. The Belleville Outfit plays Waterloo Records at 5 p.m. May 27 (waterloorecords.com) and May 30 at Momo’s.
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By christian ward
May 22, 2009 7:45 PM | Link to this
As an austin musicin myself I really resonate with what Belleville is trying to accomplish. That of course is to actually leave the creative womb of this dot on the map and spread the joy of their creative collection. It is not easy or direct in nature to do so. I loved their first crack at it and hope that the new album bodes well for the landscape of musicians in Austin trying to achieve festival worthy status. With love, Christian from The Lost Pines