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By Dennis Cook
Take away the drums. Let the strings and weathered wood carry the rhythm. Add human songbirds with voices intertwined like fresh, green vines. This is the urban idyll conjured by Nickel Creek, a trio of stupidly talented San Diego kids who’ve made one of the albums of the year.
Initially put over as bluegrass prodigies, there have always been stranger inklings swirled into the traditional picking by Sean Watkins, Chris Thile and Sara Watkins. Like Dan Hicks, Ry Cooder, Leo Kottke, and other fellow travelers, Nickel Creek harness all their well-honed skill and natural talent to craft music of enduring beauty and substance. This active engagement with what’s come before, without bowing down to precedence, actually helps music evolve. There were flashes of them at their best on their first two albums, like the utterly unexpected but oh-so-right cover of Pavement's "Spit On A Stranger” on This Side, but this latest effort exhibits the maturity and genre-less sensibilities of great recent solo releases by Thile and Sean Watkins.
No longer really bluegrass in any way besides their instrumentation and occasional heel-lifting instrumentals like “Scotch & Chocolate,” this hues closer to L.A. pop mafia like Aimee Mann, Michael Penn, and Jon Brion (all three Creek-ers have played with Brion at Los Angeles’s singer-songwriter mecca, Largo). Over 14 carefully constructed tracks, it’s nakedly apparent we’re listening to a band that’s going their own way. Nothing seems assembled for any reason except the music wanted this form. Considering how easy it would have been to further tailor their sound for airplay after the sizeable popularity of their earlier records, it’s especially encouraging to find hit makers that use their position for creative freedom rather than wearing success like a straightjacket. Mainstream radio playlists will be enriched by the new material, but in no way does it pander or steer away from odder shores like “Eveline” or “Anthony,” where the studio becomes another band member.
One is reminded of the artistic growth-spurt the Beatles went through in 1965-66 as they shed their cover band beginning and revealed the true depths of their Rubber Soul. Using vintage keyboards and actual tape recorders, this has the warmth of old mahogany seasoned with oil and flesh and undisguised affection. Realized by producers Eric Valentine and Tony Berg, everything carries a richness that’s only likely to improve with time. Even the more obvious picks for singles like “Somebody More Like You” have a '60s/'70s buoyancy that suggests their songs will be beloved oldies 20 years on.
What really catches the ear is the nuanced delicacy of everything. Each element is layered so carefully that there’s not a bit of fat anywhere. A single instrument can carry a tune – a mandolin plucked just so or a fiddle dancing on an evergreen breeze. When they breathe into the mic, it truly fills the lungs. As the world grows noisier, more aggressive, and more impatient by the day, it’s revitalizing to hear something this restrained. This is the kind of music we live with, revisited in the morning and enjoyed after the chores and children are put to bed. As sweetly as this goes down, there are plenty of thick ideas here. Any album that opens with these lines is worth giving a few passes to sink in:
Where can a sick man go
When he can’t choke down the medicine the old man knows
Given their youth (all three are in their early twenties), this could be the start of a really epic run. Taking their sack of silver and running straight to the hills, Nickel Creek are a rare breed that shuns easy answers, easy choices, for something that will resonate over the years. If they keep this up, we’ll be talking about them when they’re old and gray with the same wide-eyed enthusiasm.
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