Rabbits Motel

It’s plainly a good thing that more young Americans are making and buying recordings of Americana. But there’s also no guarantee of what sort of standard this self-produced material will cleave to. This album is evidence of one route Americana has followed. Kids take on a folksy name (Woody Pines was born one Jonathan Woods) and play dress-up, adopting some of the instrumentation, musical ornaments and clothing of older acts, without really securing the roots or achieving a nourishing bounty.

Pines and his crew ramble between nouveau Western swing, Delmore Brothers plaints and rags. Here and there the tracks exhibit some decent Travis-style guitar picking, soulful harmonia, and affecting use of tremolo and bandpass-filtered vocals. But Pines’s mostly unremarkable vocals deliver self¬written lyrics that are at their best cute and at their worst louche, dependent on provocations like, ‘Daddy was a big old pimp’, and on rhyming ‘ gasoline’ with ‘vaseline’. At the end of the road, it’s hard to tell just where Pines lives, and whether sincerity is something he strives for or whether he simply counts on drawing like-minded younger fans with his attitude and occasional pop references. Those with more traditional tastes should look elsewhere.