5 Trummors

• 1Hey Babe01:37
• 2Calico Gown02:22
• 3Yellow Spanish Roses04:06
• 4Jalisco Kid03:49
• 5Cosmic Monster04:03
• 6Cold Water Blue03:32
• 7Horse Named Blue02:44
• 8Long July03:10
• 9Supermoon Moonshine04:02
• 10I Can Still Make Cheyenne03:59
• Total Runtime33:24

Info for 5

The trouble with so much Cosmic American Music is that it’s not all that ‘cosmic’ at all. The moves are there—the mood, the ingredients, musical and (ahem) otherwise, the clothes—but the substance too often comes up a little thin. Maybe that’s fine: the Flamin’ Groovies weren’t quite the Beatles either, and so to criticize the heirs of the Flying Burrito Brothers for failing to equal their forebears’ sense of stoned celestial wonder feels a little mingy, like criticizing tomorrow for not being 1972. Enter David Lerner and Anne Cunningham’s duo Trummors, though, with their fifth and possibly best album—“possibly” only because the others, too, are so damn good—to blow this frequent quibble clean out of the water. 5 (yeah, they went ahead and made their Numerical Album, just like J.J. Cale once did) is so fresh, so sparkling, and so lovely, whatever debts it owes to anybody else are immediately canceled. This may be music with an abundant sense of history, a deep, almost Talmudic knowledge of a thousand country rock records, but it steps outside the shadow of that knowledge with a confidence that feels rare indeed.

Some of that is in the writing. A song like “Hey Babe” might seem a wisp of a thing, until you listen twice and clock lyrics as fatalistic, and as beautifully compressed, as a Robert Creeley poem, coupled with a melody that feels like it’s lived inside you forever. Some of that is in the performances, the way Lerner and Cunningham’s vocals fit together just so, as ideally paired as George and Tammy’s as they float atop accompaniments from their supporting players—Dan Horne’s spacious pedal steel on “Yellow Spanish Roses,” say, or C.J. Burnett’s spare, not-quite-barroom-feeling piano on “The Jalisco Kid”—that somehow manage to be at once understated and arresting. Some of it might be the occasional ways they make subtle adjustments to genre conventions (“Cosmic Monster” sounds closer to English psych monsters Dantalian’s Chariot than it does to canyon country, thanks to Clay Finch’s electric sitar) without sounding schizoid or breaking faith with the record’s overriding mood and identity. But none of that really accounts for 5’s startling and unshakeable immediacy, its ability to cut through the fog in one’s head and one’s mood every time it comes pouring out of the speakers.

Lerner and Cunningham lived with these songs a long while, writing them before the Pandemic struck in 2020, demoing them at home repeatedly before finally deciding to get together with Horne—an alumnus of previous records, too, as a player—in the producer’s chair for the first time. They tracked the record in LA over the span of about a week, did a bit of overdubbing later in Taos, and thus, after that long period of uncertainty, 5 arrived at its final form fairly quickly. Maybe it’s this paradox, this meeting of speed and deliberation, that gets at the record’s most striking quality, how these songs feel at once heavy and light, ancient and new, like something carved into stone with a feather. It’s a quality that fills me with admiration. Indeed, with something close to awe. (Matthew Specktor)

Trummors

Trummors
Begun in 2010 in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Trummors are a duo formed by songwriter Anne Cunningham and longtime New York City musician David Lerner, known best to some for his years of work with Ted Leo & The Pharmacists. The two multi-instrumentalists focus on acoustic instrumentation, incorporating harmonium, fingerstyle guitar, and close-harmony dual vocals into their warm sound. Early on in the group’s existence, Cunningham and Lerner moved from Brooklyn to the considerably calmer surroundings of Woodstock in upstate New York. Trummors debut album, Over and Around the Clove, was released in 2012 and reflected their recent change of scenery with its lushly earthy songs and slightly psychedelic filter on a ’70s pop sound. Moorish Highway is the follow-up to Trummors’ first LP, and will be released June 17th, 2014 on Ernest Jenning. Calling on a expanded cast of talented backing players including drummer Otto Hauser (Vetiver), guitarist Kevin Barker (Johanna Newsom), bassist James Preston (Zachary Cale), and pedal steel guitarist Marc Orleans (D. Charles Speer and the Helix), Moorish Highway was recorded at The Drawing Room in Kingston, NY by Justin Rice (Bishop Allen), and mixed by Eli Walker at Isokon in Woodstock, NY.

In a different world and a different life, David Lerner played in Ted Leo & the Pharmacists. Anne Cunningham holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and plays the harmonium. Together, as Trummors, they share songwriting and vocal duties, among other things. When their debut album, Over and Around the Clove, was released by Ernest Jennings Records in 2012, their acoustic aphorisms could find no campfire, so they exited and, like all good hippies, headed west. They landed in Taos, New Mexico, where the water doesn’t taste like wine, but rather it’s mitigated, and there’s less people in the whole town than their old city block. Waylon Jennings sang a song about the town. Doug Sham died in a motel down the street. And the Taos Hum is less a myth and more of a note that resonates like the train tracks in Memphis.

This album contains no booklet.