Rating: 7/10
While America’s mainstream is constantly stuck puzzling over the tomato issue and can’t seem to figure out how to launch women into the format at all, much less how to actually sustain their careers for longer than one hit single, Kasey Chambers is calmly churning out platinum records in Australia. While we give our country awards and airplay to pop stars, she’s become an icon by releasing music often more primitive and rootsy than much of our independent scene. She’s done it all on a major label as well. All are things from which America, the birthplace of the country genre where you’d think we’d have it all figured out, could take a lesson.
For Kasey Chambers, the obvious question is how would she follow 2017’s Dragonfly, an impressive double album that isn’t even twelve months old to American ears. It was an album that explored all of her many influences and styles, from the more traditional and rootsy to rock to country pop to gospel. The answer for Chambers was to strip everything down and record Campfire, an album she says she has wanted to make all her life.
I grew up in the remote outback of Australia living a unique lifestyle isolated from civilisation. The campfire was the heart of our existence: for survival, creativity, inspiration. We hunted all our own food and then cooked it on the campfire. My brother and I did all our schooling via correspondence around the campfire. We used the campfire for warmth and light. We gathered around the campfire at night to play songs together as a family. Our connection to music and the land has developed through and around the campfire since I was born, so it has always stayed with me as a special part of my life.
She enlisted some fellow musicians and longtime collaborators because well, you don’t sing around the campfire alone traditionally; they are dubbed the Fireside Disciples, and they consist of her father, Bill Chambers, guitarist and tour mate Brandon Dodd, and Yawuru elder Alan Pigram. The result is a really unique-sounding and special album.
As you would expect, this is an acoustic affair; it’s not like you’re going to have a full band just waiting to pop out of the shadows and join you at your campfire. Acoustic guitar, banjo, and dobro are mostly what this record offers in terms of instrumentation, making it definitely very rootsy and giving it that warm feeling of sitting around the fire while someone absently picks a guitar. The Fireside Disciples are a great addition as well, as the harmonies really add to the mood of this whole thing. It’s fitting that the record opens with “Campfire Song” where you can hear the fire crackling in the background and they’re literally singing about dancing in the moonlight. “Go on Your Way” doesn’t even have instruments, it just forsakes that notion altogether and relies on their excellent harmony to tell the story. That adds to what they’re going for here, as you can imagine the atmosphere, sitting around a fire and someone spontaneously starting to sing, with the others joining in. “Orphan Heart” is the opposite, opting for instrumentation to back them throughout the song, but then fading out until it’s just Kasey and the Disciples echoing the refrain, “let me walk beside you” out into the night. Someone breaks out a harmonic on “Goliath is Dead,” as they sing in call-and-response style about that well-known biblical moment.
You can imagine as you listen to this that they’re all just sitting around having a really great time with each other. They talk and laugh openly between tracks, and in the nature of many Kasey Chambers albums, record some pretty ridiculous songs. “This Little Chicken” features Bill Chambers going on about having fried chicken for breakfast before breaking into a bluegrass tune about how this woman, or “chicken” won’t be back home again. “Big Fish” is literally a song about just that, catching fish. And “Junkyard Man” is like some old folk song you can imagine your grandmother singing that you’ve known all your life and think of with fondness but don’t really have any idea what it means. It’s like your family and friends were all just having a good time singing dumb songs together, but you could all actually carry a tune and play instruments, so it got made into a record.
Just when you think it’s all fun and not to be taken too seriously, though, they hit you with a song like “Abraham.” This one grieves for all the hurt and hopelessness in our world, and the fact that it’s stripped back so we can hear their harmonies and their emotion makes it all the more poignant. The same goes for “Now That You’ve Gone,” one of several tracks here where Kasey sings solo without the Disciples.
That said, therein lies my biggest critique with this album; aside from “Now That You’ve Gone,” the tracks without the Fireside Disciples participating vocally don’t feel like they belong. They are still acoustic and stripped back, but without the harmonies, the campfire atmosphere that this album was built on is lost. There’s a solo Kasey song here called “Fox & the Bird” which is about nothing–I mean, it’s about a bird who meets a fox, and he carries her home. It’s boring, and it doesn’t fit when the Disciples aren’t singing with her. Also, there’s a track featuring Emmylou Harris, and this is really cool since this is Chambers’ idol, but it doesn’t fit with the theme either. Also, and unfortunately, Emmylou Harris just sounds terrible vocally, and that’s upsetting on many levels. It’s like she’s out of breath or something. But even if she sounded excellent like she normally does, it’s still weird to have her here on a track with Chambers with no vocals by the Fireside Disciples. When the campfire theme is played out, it works very well, but it needed to be more consistent throughout the record.
It’s a solid album and certainly a unique one, and it was definitely a cool direction for Kasey Chambers after Dragonfly. The idea itself is a good one, and when Kasey and the Fireside Disciples stick to it, it works well. The warm, intimate vibe you get when listening to this is really special. The solo Kasey Chambers material sort of distracts from the thesis here and keeps a good album from being a great one, but Chambers is on a roll here. She’s released three good records just since I started Country Exclusive, and that hasn’t even been three years ago. I said recently on Twitter that if you’re not a Kasey Chambers fan, you’re doing it all wrong, and this album is just another exhibit for that argument.