Hush Arbors – Yankee Reality (2009)

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Hush Arbors (born Keith Wood in Charlottesville, Virginia on April 30, 1977), is a Virginian folk musician. His music sees traditional folk merged with elements of country and psychedelic music, in the vein of other modern folk acts such as Six Organs of Admittance. Along with releasing solo material, he is also an occasional member of Current 93.

“When Keith played me Yankee Reality I knew it was not only the best Hush Arbors album, but also that Keith’s work had entered an entirely new world bursting with hauntings.

This is a classic, timeless, ageless American album, full of hope and yearning, beauty and melancholy, and which pours out stories like flowers. Are these rainbow-at-end-of-the-world songs? Or heart’s break/heart’s ease-at-the-end-of-the-road songs? Anyway, I thought of horses and acid, death sleeping in a shack, the river bursting its banks and grinning like whisky, the birdlight and fading empires. Starry, dreamlike, plaintive, gorgeous and broken, Yankee Reality is a perfect and utterly individual work, endlessly inventive yet instantly recognizable as being in a noble and generous tradition.

Yankee Reality sends shivers through my body when I listen to it. I don’t know where to start, because I don’t know where it ends. A circular masterpiece effortlessly stationed between the sea, the sun and the moon.”

~ David Tibet/Anok Pe/Current 93, August 2009

Hush Arbors - Hush Arbors (2008)

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Keith Wood, along with constant foil Leon Dufficy, is Hush Arbors, and while his self-titled Ecstatic Peace! debut is not his first album by any means – he’s been at this almost ten years - it does provide the perfect introductory point to Hush Arbors' distinctive take on psych folk. Combining the pensive songwriting of John Phillips circa Wolfking, the plaintive honesty of Neil Young, and the fishtank-gazing cacophony of Six Organs of Admittance (Wood is a frequent collaborator), Wood writes classic-sounding songs that sound readymade for AM radio, circa 1968. These songs would play as comfortably over a scene from The Wonder Years as they would piping from a noxious chillout tent at Terrastock. There are songs here that resonate with the minor key melancholy of Bert Jansch or perhaps even Mark Kozelek, while others hint at a Wire subscriber’s Siamese Dream, all propulsive rhythms and lysergic electric guitar. Some albums are ‘growers’ – not this one. While repeated listens reveal more and more details, as good albums should, this is also an album that commands immediate attention. Try to put it on in a crowded room – just try. You’ll have a ‘High-Fidelity-Beta-Band’ scene on your hands within two minutes.