Josh Lederman y Los Diablos - The Town’s Old Fair
The cover says it all. This album is about people unable to hang onto their memories and people unable to forget their past. The Town’s Old Fair is a metaphor for both utopic youth and the gathering place of the small town. Everything happened there that one fateful, beautiful summer, remember? Josh Lederman remembers; whether he wants to anymore isn’t as certain. The medium of the memories is of course the music: playful yet heartsick coffeehouse rock that’s influenced by the romanticism of Van Morrison and early Tom Waits. Lederman’s backup band is tight, both able to go over the top for devilish polka romps and able to play the wistful waltz, complete with sad licks of violin and mandolin.
But it’s the warm ubiquity of John Buczkowski’s accordion that takes us back to a time that once was but is no more. Beneath the accordion’s haze of cigarette smoke and candlelight we travel to a time of not bars, but of small-town pubs and saloons where everybody knows what everybody else is up to, and Lederman and his crew are out sowing their wild oats.
Lederman and his Demons’ first kind of song is the hearty ballad of ramshackle adventure where after its over, everyone brushes themselves off and can’t believe we’re still alive. “I’ve Been Down So Long”, Lederman sings the title, “the sun sets at dawn in my town.” The band sounds like a slower and drunker Squirrel Nut Zippers as they milk each note for extra oomph. Lederman gets some gravelly intensity in his voice before he breaks into a wicked cat call: “I want you to tell her the truth/About me and you and the things we do/With the devil frying eggs on my roof.”
The middle of the album has more of the quieter, sentimental songs that lack the kick and flair of the romps. Lederman’s continual pessimism doesn’t abide as well here as it does when juxtaposed with upbeat, falsely cheerful material. It’s effective when “Fish’s Eddy” opens with “Let’s have a little baby, I’ll leave you someday maybe” and is populated with stomping beats and handclaps. These are the sorts of tracks that successfully achieve the double-sidedness of memory, where the idealized rough-and-tumble image of the old town back in the proverbial day is tampered by the painful side of memory.
A lot of the latter half does start sounding too much of the same thing, but that doesn’t take away from the strength of many of the tracks on this long, 16-song record. And even when some of the melodies do get a bit drab, Lederman’s lyrics are still sharp, telling a detailed story every time. “Well the days go by and the children cry and their strollers turn into cars/And the years pour out down the spigot’s mouth in the sticky, stinking bars.” These songs describe that collective loneliness that comes with memory, but for those of you who could care less about all that highbrow mumbo jumbo, it’s simply a rollicking good time.
