COUNT THIS PENNY - Pitchman

They've called it “Appalachian pop”: music with a soul as ancient as the shadow of the mountains, wrapped in a glow as bright as a summer afternoon. It's a label coined by the Rigells, the married couple behind their band, Count This Penny. They took their name from an episode of “Sesame Street”, but the songs they write have little to do with the colorful dreams of childhood: beneath the polished country sheen of Count This Penny beats a dark heart, made of broken loves and haunting memories. Something more, in short, than just another musical couple crowding the folk scene.

Count This Penny's songs, to use their own words, are “songs born from a tireless traveling to and from the mountains back home”. Where home – of course – is the homeland of country music, Tennessee, the land where the Rigells first met each other as high school students. Allen and Amanda now live in Madison, Wisconsin, and it was at Madison's Smart Studios that they recorded their full-length debut, “Pitchman”, within the same walls that once hosted the likes of Nirvana, Garbage and Sparklehorse.

Banjo, pedal steel, winding fiddle flourishes: much like the drawer crammed with memories and trinkets pictured on the cover of “Pitchman”, Count This Penny's music flaunts the whole typical toolkit of classic Americana. But it's above all the interplay of Allen and Amanda's voices that takes center stage, in the purest Gram & Emmylou style.

Allen's dusty timbre pushes the inflections of “Medicine” toward frontier territory, aided by John Henry's gypsy-style violin. And when Amanda takes the mic, the title track unspools with a melodic softness that wouldn't look out of place in the repertoire of First Aid Kit.

The two also take turns writing the songs (with the exception of a cover of songwriter Ryan Barrington Cox's “Listen Down”), with John Ray and his banjo rounding out the band's lineup. In the end, the duet dissolves into celebration on the spirited country-gospel of “Mother”. Perhaps a touch too much traditionalism lingers here and there along the way, when the songs' personalities become less defined. But even taken as a genre record, the songs on “Pitchman” shine with a gleaming polish.

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10/12/2012