It can be said – possibly? probably? – that we are in the waning days of the neo-folk (freak folk, psyche-folk, etc.) trend. That is not to say that there are no longer interesting groups producing that kind of music nor that there are not the same number of bands producing that music, but rather that its historical moment, a pattern traced out of manifold of musicians, is coming to a close. At any moment, there are a large number of patterns to be chosen from, the boundary conditions for this amount limited only by historical, cultural and sub-cultural conditions; thus, when I say that the days of neo-folk are in wane, all this means is that new patterns are being exploited. Some other trend is being pursued. Bands that have existed already for years will be highlighted and grouped together not due to some fact of the matter, some fact about their music that makes sense – what groups together the disparate bands that were the paradigm cases for the neo-folk trend? What fact groups together Animal Collective, Scorces, Devandra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, Sunburned Hand of the Man, etc.? Common friends? A similar attitude? Similar methods? Yes, yes, yes, and we can find such family resemblances that that makes the grouping make sense – so see, it is this combination, these family resemblances in concert with these historical and cultural conditions that let us delimit whatever you want to call the rough grouping neo-folk.
These historical conditions then are what I am preoccupied with when I listen to Nethers, or rather when I am intellectually reflecting on their album (All work and no play makes Jack something something). We have within the neo-folk movement interesting pockets where the history of folk is Aufheben – a word of Hegel’s which is generally translated as negation, which roughly is a process in which a subject’s past reappears in a different guise; it’s a way of understanding the moments of history and how they work and how the entire history of a thing – a person, place, piece of music and so on – is always there and implicit at every stage of being. When I hear Nethers, when I think about the band, it is interesting then to pick out these moments to understand their new form. There is first, the moment of their prior band, The Carlsonics – this you hear in the guitar work, the drumming, but there are moments of each band the members of Nethers have been in as you trace the line back (see even explicit moments like a riff from Scutari’s “Happy Days Will Follow” show up in “If the Shadow Suits You”). There are moments of earlier folk that show up too, the British strain from a few decades ago, especially in the vocals. Nethers itself finds the physical past, the people that make it up, their attitudes, the fun they have on stage, an admixture, a newness perhaps added to The Carlsonics – then therefore, there are two attitudes (intellectual, not visceral – if you want a visceral reaction, go listen to the MP3s on their website and have one yourself rather then getting a scripted carbon copy) one can take when sitting down with In Fields We Will Lie: 1) There is the linear path. A simple progression is seen. This though might be a mistaken way to approach not just Nethers but all music, as if it is merely the unfurling of a flag. 2) The non-linear path. Examine the convergence of historical factors, genre boundaries, the band members’ pasts and any other vector combining to in our rough estimation. This is not a rolling out, but a constantly roiling mixture.
