Localized Sour Boy, Bitter Girl

Acoustic artists all too often approach their craft with phoned-in, makeshift arrangements akin to what their unskilled punk brethren do with an electric—namely strum the hell out of six-string—as a way to address an aural void that needs to be filled. Luckily, with Songs About The Landscape Or Songs About The Wolf Army, Sour Boy, Bitter Girl never resort to this coffee-shop strumming. Instead, singer-guitarist BJ Buttice leads his band through a sound influenced more by Neil Young's back catalog than that of the predictable and shopworn Bright Eyes influences. The band’s not content to stop at folk-rock either, pushing Songs into realms where keyboards, drums and—ever so occasionally—electric guitar leads all come and go as needed. Buttice’s lyrics, which he delivers in a plaintive and evocatively dry voice, command the songs as lupine references and allusions to water and deserts flit through to tie everything together.

“Refugee Fighters” opens the album with a tale of a marauding army that’s equal parts Decemberists-styled yarn and Cormac McCarthy-esque apocalyptic terror, finely tuned with an acoustic guitar and piano arrangement. Buttice’s lyrics swing from lonesome, broken-man ballads—“Waltz Of The Sea Wolf”—to a dry, matter-of-fact confessional style, like in “Sea Swallow,” as the band dresses up Songs with a flurry of extras, from a blink-and-you’ll miss-it electric guitar lead in “More” to a desert-dry hybrid of roots rock and pop in "A Man Don't Need." 

It takes a lot more than an over-emoting frontman and a string section to make an acoustic album work. If that important lesson is frequently lost on Sour Boy, Bitter Girl's unplugged contemporaries, it the hallmark of Songs About The Landscape Or Songs About The Wolf Army. The Fort Collins band knows its way around an arrangement, and puts that knowledge to use on this album. Listen and take heed, Conor Oberst and Sam Beam wannabes. Grade: B+