Tobacco City Horses

TOBACCO CITY
Horses
(Scissor Tail)

I love the hell out of Tobacco City. Slow staggering chords with crystalline pedal steel is always an easy win for me, but their voices, drifting through the smoke of the Great American Loser's trailer fire of a life with the precision of an perfectly executed party dare is the THING. There is hope in their melancholy, humor in their trauma. When they harmonize "I can see the light" in "Bougainvillea", it's from the view of a bug trapped in the amber of small-town circumstance, your every misstep solidifying around you. Their harmonies are like Gram and Emmylou if they still played Wednesday's at Sneaky Pete's, muted sports highlights on the tv's behind them creating halos, beckoning all drunken angels to come forth. They are cinematic, is what I'm getting at.

There are plenty of hilarious lines like on their sublime debut album, but they, they being Chris Coleslaw and Lexi Goddard, lean more into the melancholy side of humor here, like in "Blue Deja Vu":

Someone hung the moon
In the wrong damn room
Now I'm strung out and howlin'
At an empty night

You could happily live a life of desperation in that palace of a couplet, car lights from the motel parking lot knifing through the gap in the dirty curtains like the Lord's wrath. The dreamy three-part "Horses" strewn across the album like a stepkid's toys, intoning "Horses in the ..." shade, then surf then sand against an almost orchestral clatter, each one more formed like the stages of life, like sped up footage of a flower wilting, like the stages of a car accident... I feel each dot of their magical ellipses like Narcan or at least a congenital heart issue. I can't think of a band I feel more love about right now than Tobacco City.