The track gradually picks up intensity, latterly joined by drums, that creep in and slowly take the track off into a heavy, brooding piece that’s as loud as anything Peter has ever released. The album opens with the sublime In Line To Die, it introduces the album with a bluesy guitar riff, all country twang and steady bassy pulse. There are times when he seems to channel some of the wide-screen Americana that William Tyler perfected on his own state of the nation address, Modern Country, allowing the music to paint pictures of modern America. The voice, still the middle ground of silk and gravel, remains front and centre, yet the musical backing feels more confident, more able to make a statement of its own.
If lyrically, The Greener Pasture feels like a natural progression from Anthropocene, musically too this feels like Peter moving his sound forward. Farming practices, smart phones, John Wayne as a representation of American individualism, Peter finds reasons to question all of them, and asks how much of it is designed to keep us in our place, controlled by market forces that don’t even give us time to question them. It’s like a beautifully crafted cross-stitch that only at the last second spells out, “everything is fucked”. It’s a fascinating record, it seems to find disparate threads of modern society, and weave them into a picture of the excesses of consumerism and erosion of life as it used to be.
Now almost three years on Peter is set to return this week with his latest album, The Greener Pasture. Peter toured heavily on the back of that album, and were it not for my own misplacing of an appendix this interview should have taken place in the winter of 2017.
The album that followed, fittingly entitled Anthropocene, followed along that most impressive path, a mixture of quiet anger, acceptance, and just enough hope to keep you guessing. It was quite a remarkable introduction, as he matter-of-factly called out the pending apocalypse, without a hint of melodrama or doubt, just resignation that the human impact on the planet was already too late to reverse. He felt ageless and somehow wise, channeling the spirit of Bill Callahan, Murray Lightburn, Kurt Wagner, men many years his senior, as he croaked out the opening lines, “where do I go, when I don’t want to be, with idle hands awaiting catastrophe, here in the anthropocene”. It was the summer of 2017, with only the gentlest strum of a guitar-line for accompaniment, his vocal crept in, deep, rich and luxurious. The first time we ever heard the music of Peter Oren is a moment that has really stuck with us.
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