The Rites of Man is the debut album from the Tom Paines, the latest incarnation of veteran New Orleans jacks-of-all-musical-trades Alex McMurray and Jonathan Freilich. They’ve collected folk songs from throughout the English-speaking world in the decades surrounding the turn of the 19th Century into the 20th. There’s plenty new about the songs on The Rites of Man, though. The album combines a traditionalist’s fluency in the idiom of the songs with an innovator’s ear for their development and place in New Orleans music’s current moment.
Freilich and McMurray’s catalogues and projects—separately and together—are diverse enough to pique interest in their approach to the material. The songs themselves are more or less unbreakable, and the album’s sparse arrangement and production stay out of their way. They leave us to feel the tradition’s full musical and historical freight.
Rites of Man stakes a claim to its material, though, and not just through the duo’s characteristic string work and McMurray’s distinctive singing voice. The album is designed to take us on a journey through the material. The melodic guitar picking and sweet vocal approach to its familiar opening tracks, the stalwart busker fare of Elizabeth Cotten’s “Shake Sugaree” and Jimmie Rodgers’ “Waiting for a Train,” suggest to the listener a smooth ride through peaceful musical territory. It gets more fraught when the material reaches into folk music’s darker lyrical content. By the closing track, the suggestively titled “Love Me or I’ll Kill You,” the guitar has grown percussive and the vocals strained and gravelly, suggesting the song’s immediacy and urgency, and making it the Tom Paines’ own. Obviously, the Tom Paines have just scratched the surface of the tradition they’re mining; here’s hoping they continue to follow this seam.
