(Review from Tiny Mixed Tapes) To my mind, it seems like Southeast Engine have always striven for timeliness rather than timelessness. “Ain’t that the way things go/ Down to an all-time low/ We lost all our discoveries/ Now we’re waiting on recoveries,” goes “Cold Front Blues,” the second track off Canary, invoking hopelessness with a certain hardscrabble moral authority, a voice that resonates in America’s current post-bailout, high-unemployment miasma.
“Black Oil,” off of their excellent last album, From The Forest To the Sea, was another of those gestures, and “Law Abiding Citizen” told the story of a geography student who charted maps for undersea oil exploration. Canary goes for a similar relevance here on “1933 (Great Depression),” where Adam Remnant asks, “So all our loss and our dispossession/ Leaves us here begging the question/ What’s so goddamn great about the Great Depression?” Their last album felt more ambitious and focused, with its three-part introduction and general biblical arc. Canary is less unified, but there are great songs here.
The whole album is loosely structured around the toil of poverty and dispossession in a small Ohio mining town, Canaanville, during the Great Depression. Hopes are glimpsed from the top of a ferris wheel, and the residents cling to their local identity and even the mountains themselves as a source of strength. In “Adeline,” the “trees have all been cut down for the industries,” but despite the barren landscape, something of its spirit remains in the song’s subject, the narrator’s twin sister. The men in town “find you in their dreams pressing wine from black cherries/ And they’ll never know what that means but they know they need you.”
