Sad Daddy -- Ozark Shine
With Ozark Shine, Sad Daddy both preserves and progresses roots music, inviting you into their cabin for a casual gig, writes Steve Roberts
Americana or “roots” music has a quality that will never be adequately captured in record form. And seeing Arkansas’ Sad Daddy at a concert venue, cabin, campfire party or a swap meet jamboree is probably the best medium to enjoy what they create. But the four-headed hydra of Melissa Carpenter, Brian Martin, Rebecca Patek, and Joe Sundell encompass more than just Americana or roots in their music (bluegrass, early country, blues, jazz, ragtime, swing, how many more genres can you name?) Sad Daddy has an electric quality to their acoustic instruments, energetic and bouncy even in the slower numbers. They’re the kind of band that makes you wish you’d learned the old fashioned art of dancing.
And on their newest release Ozark Shine, listeners might be wondering where the jug player is in the band’s configuration of guitar, banjo, fiddle and bass, with occasional kazoo accents. To be fair, that’s sort of what their last record, 2022’s Way Up In the Hills, was about, which included a lot of standard hillbilly accompaniment like hamboning (slapping your arms and legs in a musical manner.)
But what you get here is a baker’s dozen of songs whose style hasn’t changed that much in a hundred years, songs about fishin’, drinkin’ cookin’ and other verbs where you cut off the g at the end. All four musicians here are also songwriters for Daddy, more or less splitting the duties equally, and in most cases the lead vocals are spread out liberally also, though expect a good helping of multi-part harmony on each track. And that may be why the band’s output comes across as a casual gig played at someone’s house: this seems like friends collaborating, no one wanting to step forward and claim the lead singer or “star” status.
And the only thing messing up the image of them as four equal contributors is the fact that bassist and vocalist Melissa Carpenter’s voice is easily the most recognizable and enjoyable. She has a twangy, back country croon that’s smooth as buttermilk, and suits both melody and harmony equally. It’s a star quality voice, and while the other three vocalists are no slouches, they don’t hold a candle. Their voices are unmemorable in comparison. Often Sad Daddy choruses have multi-voice harmonies, and it’s almost unfair to include Carpenter in these because she becomes the lead vocalist even without trying.
Complicating that, the songwriting is pretty homogenous. A casual listener might have trouble telling where one tune ends and another begins: track to track we’ve got the same vocalists, the same instruments mostly, the same subject matter largely. The tempos and song structures don’t vary much, making it puzzling what the purpose of having four people write songs is when they all come out this similar.
Each member of SD also has a lively solo career and work with other collaborators outside of this, giving the impression that when they get together in this configuration it’s a labor of love. The band and the album scratch an itch for someone wanting to revisit the “No Country for Old Men” era with some newer music, but a hillbilly band is always going to sound best playing on someone’s porch instead of a streaming platform.
