“This third full-length of encyclopedic Americana shows Joseph Barresi elaborating on his odd merger of personal minutiae and public history. 𝘐 𝘚𝘢𝘸 𝘈 𝘎𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘱𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘏𝘰𝘳𝘴𝘦 𝘊𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘕𝘰 𝘎𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥 appears almost Lorca-esque in its take on the hyper-current-meets-the-heriditary. Coming off a few years of heavier performance and a shifting and expanding membership, Chico States’ band shows a pithiness in style and sonic clarity that earlier records hadn’t yet realized, partly due to scale. But here you can feel—in mind and chest—the distance and scary spaciousness of Barresi’s experience of travel through subcultures of the Pacific Coast, France, Aotearoa, Maine, or even along tracks in imaginary locations like Farmington Bay. It’s difficult, and rewarding, to know an artist whose voice confuses you about what’s real and what’s simply interesting. Barresi’s is like that, and this third record gives it a durable body.
Like the tongue-and-cheek term “American primitivism” Fahey gave to his guitar music, the terms cosmic Americana or even anti-country become easier ways to understand this music. But the joke is that there is no actual desire to appropriate: in fact, Barresi’s songs are achingly sincere and concerned with real relationships to tradition, place, people, and 2020s gestalt. Folk music, from Roud Ballads to the documents of Appalachia made by Alan Lomax, has always expressed the individual situation in a way others feel inclined to repeat. In recording highly idiosyncratic, personal music borne out of compulsory love for rail systems especially, Chico States permits us to partake in the organized disorientation normally reserved for trainspotters.”
– Alex Silver
Released October 23, 2025 by Anything Bagel.
***
Included on The Best Country Music on Bandcamp for November 2025
Press for I Saw A Galloping Horse Cover No Ground
***
