The Mohican Scouts is the stage name for the music of singer/screamer/songwriter and recent-immigrant-to-New Orleans Parker Hobson, and "flat-footed ghost" is his first full-length album, a debut showcasing the Scouts' unique brand of indie-folk with a passionate, urgent fringe.
The band began life as a two-piece college act, a vehicle for Hobson's songwriting, fingerstyle guitar, imaginative lyrics, and unique-if-nothing-else vocal delivery. The other piece was Erica Cribbs on the violin, a steady counterpoint to the trembling, screaming, jumping-around spaz to her left, and through this combination the Scouts built a reputation on the Davidson College campus and in the Charlotte, N.C. area for rollicking, high-energy acoustic shows.
"flat-footed ghost," however, builds on this acoustic foundation to expand the Scouts' sound in wholly new directions-- drums, basses (both electric and acoustic), banjos, distorted banjos, distorted strats, whispers, screams, moans, feedback loops, delay pedals, spoken words, and samples (which include a wax cylinder recording of a dirty joke about Grover Cleveland) are all thrown into the mix, weaving together a diverse set of influences, styles and timbres with Hobson's distinct voice. The result is a unique sound, some strange kind of thrash-folk that trembles with a visceral energy.
The record builds and releases and flows and ebbs as a whole, but here's a bit more about a few of the catchier tracks:
#2, "ghost town holler," is perhaps the most radio-ready of any song on the record and a powerful assertion of both the band's potential and its sound;
#4, "do the lindy," is a softer, melodic, fingerpicked tune featuring an upright bass and a dulcimer;
#7, "feet, run, bear," is a sprawling piece that builds to a frenetic, fiddle-sawing climax whose protagonist is a young man in a coma whose family squabbles about what kind of music to play at his funeral, ignoring his explicit request for Deep Purple;
#1, "cherokee mom," features feedback loops and acoustic delay pedals that break the record in with an upbeat banjo surprise;
#9, "jesse stuart reads the blues," features the aforementioned Dirty-Joke-of-Centuries-Past while telling a story based very loosely on the life of Kentucky author Jesse Stuart, who achieved fame and notoriety while writing about the beautiful, quirky, and bizarre people of his Greenup County home, but then found it hard to return, as people didn't always take terribly well to how they'd been portrayed to the world.
Please get in touch and let us know what you think of the music. We are online at www.myspace.com/themohicanscouts and can be reached through e.mail at themohicanscouts@gmail.com. Cheers!*
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*A FOOT-NOTE.
Right, so. The above was lifted from a press release I've been sending out, and seems kind of goofy and stuffy and generic, so if you've read this far, you deserve a more first-person representation of The Deal (I felt really silly typing all that in the third person):
Hi. My name's Parker. I wrote and recorded and produced all of these songs, the resulting album being my final project of undergraduate study at Davidson College in Davidson, NC. I performed regularly as a duet with a violin and wrote the majority of the parts that you hear on the record, though Erica did collaborate on her parts in some cases. The rest of the band was brought in to record the album.
Unable to convince any of the other musicians to use their newly attained Liberal Arts Degrees to fart around playing music with me, I've struck out on my own in pursuit of re-forming the band and playing my absolute keester off around the New Orleans, LA area. I'm currently performing solo under the same name "the mohican scouts" and am slowly finding people interested in getting the (new) band back together. So let's keep in touch, dig? I'm still pretty rotten at the networking-music business part of my newly chosen profession, but I'm going to be playing and screaming and jumping around on stage for as long as I'm drawing breath so maybe we'll meet each other and I can buy you some kind of a drink that'll make you pretty happy.
Seriously, please enjoy the music in the meantime and please do get in touch. I want to meet you, dammit. S'long, s'long--
-Parker.
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