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Old Saw, “The Wringing Cloth” (Lobby Art, 2025)

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Now with a second pressing due to drop in March, this sprawling double LP is lamentably the final release from this beloved rustic Americana collective from New England. The decision to bring the project to an end at this particular stage is a bit of a surprising one, as The Wringing Cloth often feels like a bold creative leap forward that transcends the more drone-based fare of the ensemble’s earlier albums to expand into some fresh and more Appalachian-sounding new directions. Hopefully, that means that composer Henry Birdsey and his collaborators have another similarly great project cooking for the future, but at least there is some consolation in knowing that Old Saw’s swan song features a handful of the most beautiful pieces in their entire all-too-brief discography.

While this album is unquestionably a significant and deliberate departure from the more drone-centric structures of the collective’s previous work, the rolling and rippling waves of banjo arpeggios in pieces like the opening “Song For Paloma” often feel like a more evolved form of drone instead. I liken it to a stream or river, as the overall effect is still hypnotic, meditative, and sustained, but it comes with a sense of organic unpredictability, continual transformation, and forward motion as well.

There is also a big emphasis on pedal steel, lap steel, and resonator guitar this time around, which alternately evokes old time-y country music stretched & blurred into sleepy, slow-motion dreamscapes or a gently hallucinatory twist on a Morricone-style Spaghetti Western gunfighter showdown (“Redaction Hiss”). In fact, this whole album feels like a re-imagined soundtrack to a dreamlike Western, as it vividly evokes a series of pre-industrial scenes of lonely prairie vistas, wide open blue skies, community barn raisings, cozy wood cabins, old-time fiddlin’ and distant trains steadily chugging their way towards warm homecomings. 

While that vision can certainly be quite beautiful and favorably reminds me of a less bleak Wisconsin Death Trip at times, I had a bit of a hard time fully warming to this album at first. For one, it veers a bit too heavily towards the ambient Americana of projects like Cowboy Sadness for my taste, as I am a bigger fan of Birdsey’s more gnarled and ritualistic-sounding Tongue Depressor project. There are occasionally traces of that weirder and more dissonant side like distressed tape manipulations or the visceral metal strums strums buried in the depths of “Tilt of the Lamp,” but they tend to be relegated to a subtle textural element rather being wielded as a knife that carves through the languorous, soft-focus Western reveries. It can be a bit exasperating to hear submerged evidence of the sharper edges that would have elevated The Wringing Cloth into a more intensely alive album. 

I was also a bit thrown by the decision to make this a double album, as there is a pervasive similarity running through several of these pieces that significantly dilutes the album’s overall impact. While I can understand why The Wringing Cloth ultimately took the shape it did (immersive sustained mood, excitement about new directions, final release for a project with plenty of material, etc.), it is easy to imagine a more lean and distilled version of this album that would have been an absolute fucking masterpiece from start to finish.         

For me, the heart of that hypothetical masterpiece would be the three-song run of “Long Distance Engraving,” “Lacustrina,” and “The Flood Spires,” as well as “Ribbons of Marble,” as all four pieces strain towards towards the transcendent in a varied and inspired ways. In “Long Distance Engraving,” for example, an organ drone with tape-warped flickers of dissonance unexpectedly blossoms into a gently hissing and clattering train rhythm that propels it through a warmly beautiful swirl of rippling acoustic guitars and swooning and sliding violin drones. The end is great too, as the shaker rhythm slowly fades away to leave behind a trebly outro of collaged machine noise. “Lacustrina,” on the other hand, is the most gorgeous incarnation of the album’s rolling arpeggio waves, as it nicely enhances the formula with some achingly beautiful chord changes and a bit of welcome (if submerged) feedback snarl.

Elsewhere, “The Flood Spirals” revisits those rolling waves in considerably more smeared and queasily dissonant fashion en route to a wonderfully immersive and hallucinatory sound collage of panning and warping ripples, train bells, industrial machinery, broken glass, feedback ghosts, and tape abuse. At its best, it lands somewhere between a swaying lysergic wheat field of exploding colors and the feeling of ascending to heaven.

“Ribbons of Marble” also seems to feature a touch of the divine, as its hypnotically pulsing banjo strums and buzzing chant-like drones organically wax and wane while subtly expanding into warmer and more haunting layers of harmony. In fact, it is so fucking beautiful that it has sent literal shivers down my spine on more than one occasion. On one level, it feels like the birth of an absolutely mesmerizing strain of rustic American minimalism, but it also feels like such a perfect glimpse of heaven that it really leaves nowhere else to go. Given that, I can partially understand why Old Saw decided that The Wringing Cloth was going to be their final statement, as they’ve managed to fitfully take their dreamlike vision of wood-and-steel Americana to the highest heights that they (or anyone else) could possibly hope to reach.  

Listen here.

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Old Saw, “Country Tropics” (Lobby Art, 2021)

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This is the debut album from a “network of New England string pluckers, organ drivers and bell ringers” centered around composer/pedal steel guitarist Henry Birdsey. This is my first real encounter with Birdsey’s work, though I was vaguely aware of his duo Tongue Depressor with Crazy Doberman’s Zach Rowdan. While I do not get the usual otherworldly “Just Intonation” vibe from Country Tropics‘ buzzing and layered harmonies, unconventional tunings have historically been a central theme in Birdsey’s work, so that may be an element here too. 

Then again, Old Saw seems like a very different project than Birdsey’s usual fare in one very significant way, as Country Tropics is billed as a unique strain of devotional music. I believe it is a secular one, however, as the album description claims “Old Saw points our gaze downward towards the terrafirma unconsidered, and guides our hands into the dirt” rather than towards a “fantastical, celestial vision of understanding.” Regardless of their inspirations, Old Saw is an ensemble like no other, approximating a rustic drone or free folk ensemble like Pelt or Vibracathedral Orchestra in an especially warm and transcendent mood (albeit not so warm and transcendent as to preclude some welcome sharp edges, shadows of dissonance, and heavy buzzing strings). This is quite an excellent and unique album.

Aside from the strangely beautiful and poetic cover art of a dirt bike soaring over the clouds, Country Tropics is the sort of album that could easily be mistaken for an old private press release from a rural religious commune. I would definitely find it challenging to guess where that commune was located, however, as the vibe feels like a quaint, historic small New England town was dropped onto a sundappled Pacific coast. Regardless of where that hypothetical commune is based, Old Saw seem to be channeling something beautiful and magical in a way that is quite singular, as these four drone reveries feel simultaneously dreamlike, homespun, and earthy. 

Knowing that Birdsey is a serious avant-garde composer helps explain how the album ultimately turned out so texturally compelling and languorously hallucinatory, but it also feels like he consciously set out to make something pure, semi-traditional, and organically collaborative. This is kind of a “best of both worlds” situation, as the compositions themselves are simple, beautiful, and devoid of self-conscious artiness, yet they definitely sound like they were ultimately produced by someone who knows how to craft richly textured and harmonically interesting sound art.

Each of the four pieces is quite lovely in its own way, but the first two feel like the most gorgeous incarnations of Old Saw’s devotional dreamscapes of bygone Americana. I honestly do not know how the ensemble conjured the buzzing backing drones for the opening “Dead Creek Drawl,” as none of the instruments I think I hear (shruti box, tampura) are listed in the credits, but it all certainly sounds great nonetheless. As the piece unfolds, however, the gently churning and buzzing acoustic drones are subtly enhanced with rippling banjo arpeggios, woozily sliding pedal steel, moaning strings, and fleeting glimpses of a very cool guitar motif. The piece has a very unhurried and meditative feel that suits it well, as I do not feel like Old Saw are headed toward a destination so much as fading in and out of focus from a place of sublime bliss that I am quite content to linger in. 

“The Mechanical Bull at Our Lady of the Valley” initially has a more propulsive feel due to Harper Reed’s rapidly rippling nylon string arpeggios, but otherwise sticks to roughly the same territory as its predecessor until some inspired new elements creep into the reverie, as it feels like someone starts prying the top off a Pandora’s Box of subtle and warm psych textures (flickers of backwards melodies, twinkling and clanging bells, etc.). The remaining two pieces are cut from roughly the same cloth, which is just fine by me, as the real magic of Country Tropics is that Old Saw manage to cast and sustain a mesmerizing and immersive spell of soulful, subtly hallucinatory tranquility for nearly forty minutes. This is a quiet and modest masterpiece—the kind of album that I wish I could live inside.

Samples can be found here.