While there's nothing wrong with music that tries to be little more than soundtracks to drinking and dancing, outside its native environment of bars and clubs, preserved on vinyl, tape, or disc, such music approaches nostalgia before it's even heard. It attempts to recapture the smoke and sweat of its original venues in the relatively more sedate confines of living room, bedroom, or automobile. Too often, though, bands that try to achieve more or other than such simple and direct musics make recordings that are nearly DOA. The energy and immediacy of performance is lost, and rock-based musicians find themselves lusting after strange gods, fetishizing a scrap of orchestral color here, tediously striving to emulate the fretboard gymnastics of virtuosi there, or feebly recreating an imitation atmosphere of jazz while remaining untouched by the music's core forces. The trick is to somehow preserve the directness and simplicity that breathes life and lustiness into the music while allowing play for the subtleties that emerge on repeated listening. (Too often, live albums are like comedy albums: after you've heard that great bit once, most of its thrill is gone the next time round.) Critics seem to hear a lot of country in Pinetop Seven's music - and it is there, but not in any obvious, big-hat-wearing way. The best country speaks directly, emotionally, with due regard for both gravity and levity, showing how the simple can be rooted in the profound (and vice versa). It's this aspect of country music that Pinetop Seven has taken to heart, and it may explain why their music, similar in approach but not in sound to Lullaby for the Working Class, retains its emotional resonance despite the band's sometimes rather abstract lyrics and kitchen-sink approach to instrumentation. Rooted by Ryan Hembrey's upright acoustic bass, the band's other members Charles Kim and Darren Richard play a pawnshop assortment of instruments ranging from violins, pedal steel, harmonica, melodica, marimba, reed organ, harmonium, accordion, clarinet, chimes, piano, celesta, kettle drums, and various guitars to various electronic loops, walkie-talkies, and non-traditional instruments like nails, toy drums, shoe horns, toy piano, spurs, and thunder rolls. Yet Pinetop Seven's music never sounds cluttered or cacophonous, despite the abundant noisemaking potential of such an instrumental arsenal. The songs are smartly arranged and structured, so that the sound is full but each instrument has its place. Most important in preserving the music's direct appeal is Richard's emotive, slightly quavery voice, which brings lyrics that might seem a bit arch or precious on the lyrics sheet into hard-won life. (The one mis-step here occurs when Richard opts to speak rather than sing the words on "1st of May.") The Last Place to Go presents a new approach to film soundtracks. Boxhead Ensemble, featuring Kim and Hembrey from Pinetop Seven as well as Pinetop guest musician Ken Vandermark, Will Oldham (Palace), Mick Turner and Jim White (Dirty Three), and various other sympatico musicians, improvised the music heard on this disc as accompaniment to Dutch Harbor, an independent documentary film about a small Alaska fishing village, as the film and musicians toured venues throughout Europe. Stylistically, the music inhabits a landscape not yet fully mapped out. From jazz, it borrows an aesthetic of improvisation, but more collectively, less ebullient than that music's improvisations. (It may be that the somber, contemplative tone of the music arises more from the film it accompanies than from any particular inclination of the musicians.) From classical music, it seems to borrow a sense of extended structure: the musicians are not just jamming endlessly and pointlessly but seem to be developing an idea, less in melody or chords than in texture. It avoids the flaccidity of most "new age" musics that draw from jazz, classical, and rock. The presence of two performers from Pinetop Seven makes sense: the sounds here could almost be the raw materials of that band's music, before being refined into specific parts and structured into song. I don't think I'm likely to listen to Boxhead Ensemble repeatedly - but it is very successful at evoking a certain late night, slightly unsettling mood, and times are when such a sound is exactly what I need. (The first 1,000 copies shipped come with a bonus disc of extra music.)

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