The Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir - Ten Thousand

The Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir seem to exist in that part of Midwestern America where a guitar string is never too loose and tightly-wound melodies are about as welcome as Democrats. That’s the impression you get from hearing Ten Thousand, a bluesy country-riffic barren wasteland that seems far removed from the band’s roots of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, even if it is twinned with the more appropriate Phoenix, Arizona.

‘It’s mediocrity, not creativity’ guitarist Keelaghan intones on ‘Dumb it Down’, and it’s an adequate assessment of the group’s derivative sound: think Captain Beefheart without the mindfucking avant-garde tendencies.

Chords are plucked laboriously, French horns and bassoons spring up in seeming spontaneity and the whole exercise feels utterly complacent. So those are the usual hallmarks of blues and folk music, you say? You may be right, and fair cop to the AMGC, their raison d’etre is to pay homage to pre-World War II blues and ‘mountain’ music, so there aren’t any contemporary touchstones to be found anywhere on Ten Thousand. But when the whole thing sounds like such a plodding, linear bore it genuinely makes you wonder how many of these songs were taken beyond a first draft.

There’s a semblance of life in the band during ‘Nehemiah’s Misfortune’, which is then snuffed out by the insufferable ‘Empire State Express’ and tedium is resumed. Half of Ten Thousand sounds like music to accompany a comically overweight man walking. Why settle for this when you’ve got the shambling dirty-folk brilliance of Blitzen Trappen and the potential for rustic greatness exhibited in Murder by Death’s ‘Red of Tooth and Claw’? No reason at all. So I’m no folk connoisseur, but I know when I hear some absolute gash, and unfortunately Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir have submitted a right dud here. Utterly forgettable.

Release Date: Out Now
Label: Bailing Jack

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