Choke Cherry Tree

Album review

Ben Miller is a musician and songwriter who has his hands in enough different styles that it's hard to know where to file him. Is this folk? Country? Blues? Rock & roll? Hip-hop? None of them really covers the totality of his sound, and none of them is truly wrong, either. But one thing's for sure -- Miller is a Southerner, and at his best he's as strong and articulate a spokesman for what Patterson Hood calls "the Southern thing" as anyone working in the 2010s. Released in 2018, Choke Cherry Tree is the second album the Ben Miller Band have cut for New West Records, and it finds Miller fronting a new lineup, with Miller and his longtime musical partner Scott Leeper joined by multi-instrumentalists Bob Lewis and Rachel Ammons (who previously worked with the band Tyrannosaurus Chicken). Choke Cherry Tree is a big pot of sonic gumbo that runs hot-wired guitars up against marching percussion, finds fiddles making friends with drum loops and turntables, and makes room for horns and a string section while lost in Joplin, Missouri at four in the morning. Chris Funk of the Decemberists produced Choke Cherry Tree, and he does a fine job helping Miller and his cohorts find a balance as well as a commonality in these 11 songs, which ponder the past and the present, the personal and the political, the quiet and the forceful. Sometimes the thematic expanse of the album feels like it's about to pour outside its own boundaries, as the sore-throat guitars of "Akira Kurosawa" contrast against the moody acoustic ensemble of "My Own Good Time." But somehow Choke Cherry Tree coheres into a whole that's more than the sum of its tracks, and the sincerity of Miller's songwriting overcomes all. The Ben Miller Band sound like they're heading in five or six directions at once on this album, and Choke Cherry Tree is the rare record where that proves to be a virtue, not a failing.

© Mark Deming /TiVo