The debut record of The Wingdale Community Singers is a crisp, beautiful urban Americana record that marks a new turn for a genre that has gotten quite staid. It is a super-group of sorts consisting of David Grubbs (ex-Gastr del Sol, Red Krayola, Bastro, and just about everything else cool that came out of the general Kentucky area at that time), Rick Moody (bestselling author of The Ice Storm, and Purple America), and Hannah Marcus (whose last record for Bar/None had Godspeed You Black Emperor! members as her backing band), but it comes across as a very unassuming project that far surpasses its concepts and the preconceived notions one would have of such a lineup.

Marcus’s voice is the centerpiece of the album, but Moody’s lyrics are what make the songs really take shape and separates them from other similar-sounding bands. It is a country album about Brooklyn. The songs are littered with stories of rats, bike shops, transvestites, kids on porn sites, and other expressly modern and urban images that mix beautifully with the timelessness of the musical accompaniment. The Wingdale Community Singers make music that is both soulful and cynical, finding middle ground in which there is humor as well as heartbreak.

The musical arrangements are usually pretty sparse, with Grubbs providing most of the instrumentation. There are droning keyboards, acoustic guitars, and plinking piano, mostly unaccompanied by drums. The songs really move throughout the different sounds of the Americana underground, helped out by the fact that all three members contributed songs to the project. There are moments of great earnestness, such as “Holy Virgin Star,” which closely approximates The Band with Marcus’ lush femininity substituting for Levon Helm’s strained ruggedness. “Give It a Kiss” is a clever word play in which Marcus and Moody trade descriptions of where they find beauty in their dirty and traditionally unbeautiful surroundings. There are country stompers, such as “Rat on The Tracks” and “Fishnet Stockings,” that show the more comical and ironic side of the band, and are the best illustrations of their ability to take traditional sounds and make it relate to modern situations.

This album is a total original, and it should serve as a warning and inspiration to all of the Will Oldham impersonators that there is still something very different that can be done with the old school Appalachian folk sounds and country feel, if time, effort and talent are put into it. I am hoping that this album doesn’t get overlooked as simple super-group side project joke, because it is far more than that, and in this case the whole is much bigger than the sum of its parts. – Larry Hess