Peter and the Wolf

Austin, TX

Billboard

Peter And The Wolf - "Lightness" Buy Now

Peter and the Wolf is like totally on tour right now.

What kind of music would you want to hear if you and your baby were the last two people on a post-apocalyptic, godforsaken planet? If you were sitting by the sea, for example, watching that vast expanse of empty water crash upon the sands and then recede, knowing that this was all there would ever be. Who would you want singing from that beat-up tape player you just managed to save from whatever catastrophe it was that doomed the rest of us? Let me make a suggestion: Austin-based troubadour Red Hunter.

The first, self-titled album by Hunter’s Peter and the Wolf is absolutely mesmerizing, seducing listeners with dreams of freedom, adventure, collapse and rebirth. Through it all, Hunter’s voice – plaintive, dry as dust, desperate, yet strangely hopeful – casts his fragmented stories in a sepia tone. Songs like album opener “Under the Apple Tree,” with its magnificently understated pseudo-chorus, “How lucky to be so unusually free,” glint like shards of Depression glass, seeing their first light in decades.

The first part of the album evokes scenes from the new lives of survivors of some unnamed apocalypse – post-Armageddon folk songs. “The Fall” describes learning again the most basic survival skills: how to build a fire, how to look for water in the desert. In “Red Sun,” Hunter sings, “In my dreams I saw a thousand empty cities, papers blowing through the air,” and you get the feeling that there’s a frisson of energy linked to that destruction. The thrill is in what isn’t mentioned, the lacunae: the apocalyptic event, the future. Now anything is possible.

The last third of the album diverges slightly from the thematic path with “Dear Old Robyn,” a fun pirate number that details the picaresque life of a traveling band and ends with the promise that “tomorrow we return to the sea.” “Silent Movies” proves an almost-bubblegum ballad with Hunter crooning, “I truly believe we’ll fall in love again someday.”

The real stunner of the disc, however, is its last track, called “What Happened Up There.” At just over four minutes, it’s the longest song on the album and it begins with a voiceover about the Spanish Civil War before proceeding into heartbreaking obsessive terrain made beautiful by the interplay of voices – Hunter’s desolate and Dana Falconberry’s angelic. The first part of the song ends with an apt description of the whole record: “a waterfall suspended in the light.” Then there’s a break before the song slowly builds up again into a quasi-Guided by Voices fantasia of fizzy pop strangeness. The cumulative effect is bracing and leads you right back to the first track to start the whole magical journey again. Read more...