Album Review: Quiet Hollers by Quiet Hollers

Album Review: Quiet Hollers
by Quiet Hollers
Produced by: Kevin Ratterman
Independently Released
Available: October 23, 2015
www.QuietHollers.com

Roam the rural Kentuckiana area countryside for long enough, and you’ll eventually stumble upon what us locals call a “Quiet Holler.” It’s a quiet, countryside landscape – a sunken wooded valley of sorts – nestled throughout the rolling hillsides of bluegrass land. A place where one can reflect on only your thoughts, sane or not.

Literally speaking, that is.

Stay with me, now…

Metaphorically speaking, it’s the appropriately-named debut recorded effort by Quiet Hollers, a band based out of Louisville, Kentucky. 

It’s an album that one can easily get lost in or spaced-out to, primarily induced by lead singer Shadwick Wilde’s melancholy, lazy, yet intriguing, drug-addled vocal melodies.

As a band, as the album thoroughly demonstrates, they are a progressively blended Americana-inspired alt-country quintet, with a bluesy presentation of reverbed-out guitar work, violin strings that haunt, and a dab of 90’s inspired post-grunge. Of course, they blend all these key ingredients like bourbon over ginger ale. They’re from Kentucky, dammit!

Quiet Hollers has an undeniable Woodstock’ish vibe that permeates throughout most of the album, and peaks on tracks like the whistled chorus harmonies on “Summer Song,” or the junkie-washed blues ballad “Midwestern.”

In the end, you are left with a paranoid curiosity that’s as addictive as it is downright fucking weird. What did Wilde mean when he sang “if the bastard’s ever come, promise me you’ll take the kids and run…” in “Mont Blanc”?

Run where?

Who are these bastards, and when are they coming?

Best Album Lyric: “Shed a tear for the books I should’a read…”