New Bums

***BACK IN STOCK!!! Received a 7.6 rating from Pitchfork. Sometimes it’s best to see the world in black and white. Shades of grey are for p*****s, right—and NEW BUMS have ridden the hard road all the way to this, their album debut. They’ve played around and they’ve hit the singles scene (haven’t you turned up “Slim Volume”? 7"EP of the year, man!), but Voices in a Rented Room tells their whole life story and probably more of yours than you’d care to admit. The voices are two, spinning harmonies both heavenly and salt-pickled. Picking their direction and floating along on a pair of acoustics, New Bums are the sound of old drunk America, dancing out of the shadows, coming forth again to stand in the light, in the hopes of repopulating those sad old single-occupancy hotels before they’re all torn down. New Bums is the grudging match-up of DONVAN QUINN (SKYGREEN LEOPARDS) and BEN CHASNY (SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE, COMETS ON FIRE, 200 YEARS, RANGDA). They didn’t like each other at first, but now make sweet and sour music together over the light of the magical Sterno (if there’s anything left in the can, that is!). The ideas go back and forth between Ben and Donovan in what seems to be a true partnership. Their songs are all that: songs, with lyrics set in a space to speak to the human buried in you. People’s music, with all the stark confessions, tall tales, bleak humors and punch lines that the people can bear. Behind the acoustics and voices is lots of space, but there are a few extra instruments that come and go and tinge the scrim as the boys move from stately processional to streetcorner sing-around to bluesy weeper to low-rolling rock n roll and back again, with slide-guitar lines erupting in the dark night air and classical-tinged filigrees curling around the tarnished and rusting edges throughout.