Jake Xerxes Fussell - Out of Sight

The Guardian 100

(Paradise of Bachelors)
Fussell’s exceptional covers show how folk songs seep into funk, rock and soul, while making them decidedly his own

This splendidly named songwriter from Durham, North Carolina has had an itinerant life, previously living in Georgia and Mississippi, as well as joining his historian father on research trips across the American south as a child. He has toured with Wilco and plays for gospel group the Como Mamas, and this album came out of informal sessions with other local musicians, covering Curtis Mayfield, doo-wop groups and fiddle tunes. The sense of someone soaked in music and place comes through strongly as Fussell arranges and performs his own versions of traditional folk songs – partly culled via YouTube – that hail from North America, Ireland, the UK and, in the case of the deckhand’s song Oh Captain, the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

The Guardian 80

(Paradise of Bachelors)

The memorably named North Carolina-dweller Jake Xerxes Fussell doesn’t release originals – he is a folklorist dedicated to preserving rural music and work songs. Unlike Alan Lomax, who famously recorded American folk and blues with his father in the 20th century, Fussell sings the works he collects. Out of Sight is his third album of mellifluously upcycled cuts. He is now joined by a band – including pedal steel, violin and organ – who make easy-going, back-porch fare out of disparate tunes sourced from as far apart as Florida and Ireland.

It’s no criticism, however, because these engaging songs live anew, and this record, often about struggle, flows by with cogent musical warmth. “He’d take the nickels off a dead man’s eyes,” runs a line about a mill foreman on Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues, previously repopularised by Pete Seeger. A dancing tune, Jubilee, is delivered with wry bittersweetness. What really elevates Fussell’s record over and above worthy traditionalism, though, is its edge: Fussell is alive to the fantastical edge to a fishmonger’s sales pitch, the extraordinariness of these ordinary songs. Subtle left-field touches take these pieces somewhere special, not least the instrumental 16-20.

Pitchfork 74

Neither rigidly authentic nor conspicuously modern, the North Carolina folk scholar honors the past through transformation rather than reinvention.