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  Good Enough (2006) REVIEWS |
SHORT HAND If your life is fluted wrist bones / if your life is cursed . . . WELL, we don't get mailbox surprises like this everyday. A 36-minute burst of bare-bones folk/blues perfection. A string of words that’ll stop you cold and then keep you warm for days on end. An accomplished painter and poet, Shorthand P. Davis lives in Muncie, Indiana, with his wife and son. His music traces a path back to Woodie Guthrie with a rough-hewn delta vibe, and the man knows to embrace the technology at hand and record himself with fierce DIY gusto. He records with a minimum of equipment: a couple of guitars, toy keyboards, a beat-up microphone, a harmonica. Good Enough’s Sharpie-scribble artwork pays homage to his trusty MT100 cassette 4-track recorder. (Get me Yamaha on the phone and I’ll insist they include a copy of Good Enough with every machine.) As with contemporaries East River Pipe and Mountain Goats, the songs transcend their minimal production values, and every sonic element stands out like bright steel. The feel is loose, the songcraft tight, the melodies are whistle-all-day-long. Short Hand describes it as "knowing that you’re not out for a blockbuster (and even if you were, you’d have to be lucky enough to win some kind of cosmic lottery like Dylan or Hank Williams or Roger Miller). You’re just trying to get as close as possible to the thing you do." But what keeps us hitting the "repeat" button? It’s the arresting Folk Implosion-ish groove of the title track, an outsider anthem if ever there was. It’s the painterly harmonica & keyboard duet in the sublime chorus to "The Best of the Swing Years." It’s a guitar solo that trips and stutters along before trailing off with a sly virtuosic flourish. It’s the heartache of an aging rock-and-roller weighing the disappointments and simple pleasures of domesticity: a Kermit & Fozzie on-the-road love letter ("Super Plush Hotel"), a cruel awakening to infidelity ("Two-Part Word"), a warm tribute to married life, despite its "yards and yards of minor scars / both our in-laws and all their flaws" ("Number One"). It’s the loneliness of a cold dawn after a sleepless night ("Sit Right Down") and the haunting failure of "Smuggled Love": "The things I couldn’t say / are a thin box of nails." Good Enough is an evocation of nostalgia and regret, a balance of light and dark. You’ll wonder how Short Hand can say so much with so little. We’re still wondering why it’s the only thing we feel like listening to. Is your body made of miracles? / Is your body made of light? LISTEN ORDER SHORT HAND MYSPACE |
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