Placeless and timeless

The Shiftless Rounders sidestep geography and clocks

If you want insight into what a Shiftless Rounders show is like, last year’s live release, (places), delivers a sepia-toned snapshot of the duo’s hillbilly homage sound.

Frantic backporch banjo picking and thumping acoustic guitar rollicks give way to restrained, mournful dobro slides and moonshine-tinged melodies and harmonies. Re-shaped authentic oldies shine alongside vintage-feeling originals, indistinguishable from one another unless you have an anthropological familiarity with the material of the era.

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The obsessions of both the traditional tunes and songwriter Phill Saylor Wisor tend to be similar–a near-equal split of preoccupation between salvation (Jesus; love) and damnation (liquor; shame)–with the final track, from which the album title is drawn, is a place-by-place accounting of particular, hard-won wisdom earned from each of a staggering array of locales around North America and Europe.

The Rounders are no strangers to itinerancy. Wisor himself has a wanderlust that would border on mania if it weren’t structured around a musical odyssey that makes Alan Lomax’s documentary questing look narrow and slackerly. Leaving home in his mid-teens, the eastern U.S. native threw himself to the winds to find weird pockets of Americana.

"I got into folk songs, protest music, old time music..." Wisor recollects. "I would find random circumstances, festivals, workshops, and learn from people. Later, I did a couple years in college, started to get into early American hymn singing, shape-note singing, four-part a capella. It was popular music in New England in the early 1800s. Then I migrated Deep South, and I’d go to church every night and would soak in this old religious philosophy and old songs with these old people. I looked at structure, harmony building, singing, and I transferred it to my songwriting. I got into clawhammer style for the banjo, this archaic style of music that had so much in common with punk rock guitar and slam dancing."

The project has roots in Eli Kaplan’s 2001 stage production Black Eye, where Wisor and guitar-slinging cohort Ben Sidelinger played traveling musicians stuck in a diner during a blizzard. The roles were meant to add musical colour, but Sidelinger and Wisor found they got on well as performers and as pals, and their sonic affinities synched. The restless Sayor reconnected with his friend months later, when transportation gremlins delayed him in Sidelinger’s Massachusetts town.

"Ben was out to my show when I broke down there, and in a very short time we were doing this music together," Wisor relates. "Ben built himself a dobro and we were off." (Sidelinger builds specialty guitars out of a workshop in Washington and Wisor apprenticed with an instrument-maker in England).

As to where the Rounders "officially" house themselves these days (Wisor recently married an Edmontonian, also a band mate in the awesome outfit The Digs), he claims the band’s allegiance rests in their suitcases.

"Wherever we happen to be, that’s where we’re based," he laughs. "At this point Benny and I have these workable circuits–we meet up, work, play music, and hit the road and have fun."

The arrangement doesn’t seem to negatively impact the songwriting. "The more instrumental, banjo/dobro co-writes come through osmosis in a way," Wisor contends. "Ben has some old time tune in his head, I’ve got a different old time tune in my head, and we blend it, spook it out and do the scary harmonies. For the more lyrical, songwritery stuff, I give them to Ben. He has specific ideas about what to highlight. Mood, ambiance, breaks... he’s fantastic. I feel lucky to have him. When we first started playing this music together, we had to search for the dynamic interplay just two people can have. It’s surprising how much space two instruments and two voices can fill."

The Shiftless Rounders:
Energetically Old-Timey

In his recent autobiography "Chronicles," Bob Dylan writes, "Folk music was a reality of a more brilliant dimension . . . and if it called out to you, you could disappear and be sucked into it." Watching The Shiftless Rounders at Jammin' Java on Wednesday night, it became obvious that the duo was probably going through something similar with old-time and mountain music.

The main Rounders approach featured Ben Sidelinger playing slide guitar and Phill Saylor Wisor on banjo, though the latter occasionally switched to acoustic guitar. The two instruments gave the pair's versions of traditional numbers such as "Mole in the Ground," "The House Carpenter" and "Coo Coo Bird" plenty of depth, but it was their mountain harmony singing that provided the real drive.

Saylor Wisor and Sidelinger, who return to Maine when their ramblin' shoes need a rest, were best on the traditional stuff. When they turned to original songs such as "Big Round Moon" and "Junction City," they sounded inspired more by Bob Weir than the Carter Family. Still, the way they nailed their harmonies to resonator guitar and claw-hammer banjo on "Ida Red" would have raised the eyebrows of even the snootiest old-time-music purists.

Bluegrass fanatics cometh as Sam Bond's Garage welcomes the raw, backwoods sounds of the Shiftless Rounders on Thursday, Feb. 10. The Vermont duo Phill Saylor Wisor (banjo) and Ben Sidelinger (dobro) layer twangy vocal harmonies with masterful banjo and dobro plucking.

Their most recent release, the aptly titled Ghost in the Radio, is like listening to old Folkways records through an ancient Victrola. Featuring their producer, Jim Armenti, on clarinet, "Big Round Moon" evokes images of Benny Goodman and Townes Van Zandt sipping mint juleps at twilight. Armenti adds an almost time-in-a-bottle quality to the Rounders' brand of rootsy folk music.

Their picking work is next to virtuoso. And even if you're not into the twang, there's that historical dimension, that old Americana flavor in this music. Lyrically, the duo embodies a listless, introspective darkness, offering honest and vivid stories you just don't get in music these days. Fans of Palace Music, Smog or even Eugene's own Mikah Sykes will enjoy the Shiftless Rounders.