Two Gallants - Two Gentlemen in the Wild West

Four pairs of bare spurs stamping on the parquet floor of an alternative library in Frisco.

Two Gallants. “Dubliners”, James Joyce. A duality that has persisted since the moniker itself, in an obsessive, conflicted quest for a Hegelian synthesis. Rural and urban. Cowboys and intellectuals. Murder ballads and “Lyrical Ballads”. The tales of hobos sitting on their stone pillows around the fire, and the exploits of punks in the suburban blocks; storms of post-grunge serotonin that scramble old country-folk pamphlets; indie-rock that doles out red-hot lead to the rusty old rifles of the secessionist South.

Their music is a child as much of Johnny Cash (the putative one of “American Recordings") and his secular sermons on the deeds of thieves and outlaws, as it is of the electro-acoustic neuroses of Neil Young, the rebellious, adolescent cow-punk of early Meat Puppets or Violent Femmes (the bloodthirsty, moralistic inspiration of “Country Death Song” surely wasn't lost on our two heroes), as well as of the dispossessed of Seattle, especially in the twisted, nasal melodies or in the harsh feel of a fierce, desperate, all-throat vocal delivery.

Swept up, against their will, in the migration of alternative country-rock bands like Langhorne Slim, King Of Leon, Sons And Daughters (thanks to the interest of Conor Oberst/Bright Eyes and Saddle Creek), Two Gallants also stand out for their lyrics, which tackle crucial chapters of American history (slavery, Prohibition, the Depression), highlighting their dark sides and social contradictions (poverty, racism, violence) thanks to a sharp literary sensibility that combines the storytellers of the Delta with the musician-intellectuals of the Village. Songs set in the past that tell of old-fashioned, folkloric characters, vanished places, imaginary details, idiomatic anachronisms that nonetheless sound dramatically current with every recession, every Patriot Act, in the daily struggle to free oneself from poverty and welfare and to assert one's own dignity (it was, after all, the same with the early Dylan, who, in the midst of post-Fordism, sang of a rural America that was already almost gone by then).

Both born in San Francisco, Adam Stephens (guitar, bass, harmonica and vocals) and Tyson Vogel (drums, percussion, backing vocals) have known each other since they were five years old and have been playing together since the age of twelve. More drawn to the bay's beach-punk and the traditionals of the hinterland than to psychedelic humus or the legacy of homegrown acid-rock, they formed Two Gallants in 2002 and for two years played wherever they could (rallies, warehouses, parks or street corners), still managing to get noticed by Alive Records (the label run by the Shaw couple and John Sinclair, ex-White Panther and agitator for the MC5), with whom they debuted in 2004.

When The Throes came out, the power-duo fad was zeitgeist: the White Stripes had already devoured even the crumbs of “Elephant” (2003), and the Black Keys (Rubber factory, 2004) were one of the most talked-about acts on the alternative scene. But Two Gallants went further, and if on one hand they're more rootsy, on the other they cross every unity of time, place or action without hesitation: on “You Losin’ Out” and “Two Days Short Tomorrow”, Stephens' guitar bends blues' harmonic substrate to folk's insistent picking, jagging it into garage/punk stutters, while Vogel shakes them with syncopated tremors, epileptic fits and stop'n'go breaks (not exactly what you'd expect from Meg White). “Nothing To You” (acoustic) and “Fail Hard To Regain” (electric) revive the tradition of Irish reels, transfiguring them into rustic slam-dances — gig'n'reel-core, you might call it otherwise.

The murder ballad “Crow Jane” (already covered by Skip James and Nick Cave) shines like a Nirvana-esque unplugged performance (guitar, cello and snare brushed with wire brushes), “The Throes” is a majestic dirge à-la Young in which tradition (fingerpicking and harmonica) coexists with interpretation (the Cobain-esque lyrics dealing with domestic violence and childhood trauma). And the rest holds up just as well: “Drive My Car”, syncopated country with almost ska-like movements, “My Madonna”, an extended epic cow-blues ballad, though perhaps more conventional than the previous tracks, and above all “The Train That Stole My Man”, a modernist slide-blues expanded into a "pointillism" of indie distortions and sinusoidal crescendos triggered by Vogel.

After a tour that for the first time took them to Europe as well, in 2005 Two Gallants signed to Saddle Creek. What The Toll Tell is a formally more complex record (at times the folk-core seems to veer into a stylized exercise in semi-acoustic prog) that nonetheless doesn't lose an ounce of the energy and immediacy contained in the debut. If anything, the impact of the songs is even more violent, the melodies more strangled and insinuating, the rhythmic carcass stripped to the bone. At times it sounds like a scruffy rural punk performed by Primus, or like a Dylan lookalike fronting late-80s Mudhoney. The two singles, in this sense, fly the flag: “Las Cruces Jail”, a bare, cutting, schizoid attack, conceptually hardcore, the guitar rattling like a convict train bound for Yuma prison, Stephens sounding like a resurrected Kurt Cobain catapulted into the 1930s through some obscure psychic wormhole, while Vogel draws erratic, overwhelming rhythmic patterns that leave the listener breathless, waiting for the next surge; “Steady Rollin'” is a mid-tempo piece wrapped in a series of arpeggios that coil stubbornly in on themselves like a spiral, the ideal soundtrack for the last imaginary western that Peckinpah never got around to directing.

“Long Summer Day” is a talkin' (indie rock)-blues, an extraordinary anti-racist parable that landed the band at the center of a multimedia controversy (Pitchforkmedia, Prefix Magazine and others) centered on the fact that two white minstrels had narrated in the first person (thus, according to critics, unduly appropriating) the tragedy of a Black man (using, moreover, the word "nigger" in the chorus). Yet another proof that certain habits die hard, seeing as Alan Lomax reproached Pete Seeger for more or less the same thing back in the early 50s.

The bladed assaults continue with “16th St. Dozen” (about the exploits of a gang of bootleggers in the Prohibition era), and “Age Of Assassin” (furious spleen and electro-acoustic ups and downs). “Threnody in B Minor”, “Some Slender Rest” (echoes of the Neil Young of “On The Beach”), “The Prodigal Son” (along with “Steady Rollin'”, the most singable chorus) and “Waves Of Grain” (the most intense, spasmodic and theatrical "slo" of their short career) round out the record on the elegiac side.

For the compactness of its sound, the plurality of its inspirations and its lush songwriting, What The Toll Tell remains their finest work to this day. One of the most interesting records of 2006.

Released just a few months after the quiet, decorative EP "The Scenery Of Farewell", the self-titled Two Gallants from 2007, by contrast, disappoints on almost every level.

It's not a question of compositional skill (still remarkable for two musicians born in 1981) or of evocative passion – it's that all the most hybrid and daring solutions seem to have been, at least for now, set aside. Fingerpicking prevails over the reel-core outburst, emo over scream, harmony over dissonance, continuity over variation. Amid rustic power-ballads ("The Deader", "Miss Mery", "The Hand That Hold Me"), melodies that are a touch too elegant and dutifully sugary ("Tremblin' Of The Rose" and "Reflection Of The Marionette") and nods to Johnny Cash ("Fly Low, Carry On Crow"), only the stray "grunge'n'western" of "Despite What You've Been Told" and the "gringo" bacchanal of "My Baby's Gone" truly stand out. A bit thin.

In 2010 Tyson Vogel released an album of his own, under the name Devotionals, built around vivid, analogue fingerpicking.

Fresh – and it really is the right word – from a few years of solo adventures that, however commendable in the case of drummer Tyson Vogel (with his “devotional” fingerpicking project), didn't bring the pair much fortune, Two Gallants finally return with The Bloom And The Blight.

The line between desperate and merely whiny, between urgent and shambolic, between Radiohead and Muse, is so thin (yet so stark!) that Adam Stephens doesn't even seem to notice it, right from the album's opener, "Halcyon Days". It's the same gap that, unfortunately, separates this record from the band's previous self-titled effort, with the same quiet-loud dynamics that invariably dissolve into the flat, inexpressive melodic lines of this new batch of songs. Stephens tries to steady the ship on "Broken Eyes", with its harmless emo-country sound, a legacy of his solo work.

But the band's decline remains a genuinely hard truth to accept, especially after five years of silence.

Sometimes all the good intentions in the world aren't nearly enough to build something artistically meaningful. Intention is precisely what lies at the heart of We Are Undone, the latest attempt by the San Francisco "folk-core" duo to reignite their now lengthy career, one also marked by temporary breakups and reunions, and solo projects of varying interest, among other things.

The two certainly aren't the type to hold back, then, and the result is a mix of piano ballads, over which Adam Haworth Stephens unleashes his desperate bray ("There's So Much I Don't Know"), and more imposing "hard" saturations (the title track).

The overall impression is that the band's songwriting isn't able to sustain such a restrained, deliberate tone, and it ends up slipping into the clichés of the more or less contrite alt-country ballad. The nods to punk on "Incidental" are also underdeveloped to a fault.

The distinctive style and the performances more or less hold things together as far as they can, but in the end all the inconsistency and lack of ideas of this second phase of the duo's career comes to the surface.

Contributions by Lorenzo Righetto ("The Bloom And The Blight", "We Are Undone")

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