By It’s our Bandcamp Pick of the Week, featuring Idle County’s lived in alt-country debut LONG GONE SAVIOR!
Idle County – LONG GONE SAVIORS
Genre: Alt Country
Favorite Tracks: “Lebanon, TN,” “Caught,” “Heat,” “Long Gone Saviors”
The first words we hear Ben K. Lochen sing after a rousingly uptempo and kickass rendition of The Flying Burrito Brothers’ “Sin City” are these: “You wanna be like those old singers / you wanna live like that’s true / you wanna give all you can give / to the ones who gave to you.” Certainly by the time we hear “Caught,” the fourth track on LONG GONE SAVIORS, the lowly ambitions and lofty aspirations to be a specific breed of Graham Parsons-esque burnout country star feel apparent on Idle County’s debut—sure, you can write “Hot Burrito #1” and “She” and beat the Stones to market with “Wild Horses,” but with it is going to come lonely nights on barstools, a burned down home in Laurel Canyon, and an early grave at 26.
As most albums in the genre are now, the sound and writing of LONG GONE SAVIORS is perhaps better understood through the lens of everyone that came after Parsons—many of whom are neither gone nor saviors. The North Carolina that birthed Idle County feels deceptively unrecognizable from the music scene that’s currently thriving there right now. While the Ashville band have opened for the likes of Collin Miller, Florry, and rising phenoms i26 Connector (some of whom play on the album), and Lochen grew up seeing MJ Lenderman and Wednesday play in small clubs well before they broke into the mainstream, the album itself dizzily embodies the exact alternative southern rock sound that caused writers to come up with the term “alt country” in the first place—many forsaken Gen X tastemakers would’ve quickly anointed Idle County a tentpole of the genre alongside the The Bottle Rockets, the Jayhawks, and the Old 97s thirty years ago, and rightfully so. A bevy of booze soaked, riff heavy tomes, the stories involve characters who know their fates are tethered to destiny or tragedy—ingrates watching the world pass them by, run up bar tabs, thrown away guns, love lost and beads of sweat earned. In that sense, it most closely resembles a lost Truckers album, with Cooley and Hood and early Isbell sounding like true north stars for Lochen’s songwriting.
Cautiously acknowledging the lonely passage of time and hard life lived that can come with chasing the ghosts of country stars and sounds, the six minute closing title track feels as much written from the POV of a character as it is Lochen; inevitable tragedy runs through it as he raises his beer to sing, “This one is for all the times you said / we were gonna put this thing to bed.” Given he’s just put out one of the best alt country albums in years, I hope he’s not putting it to bed too soon, but I’d understand all the same if it all tragically fades away. You can hear Idle County’s stunning LONG GONE SAVIORS over on Bandcamp.
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