Dig Down Deep
Album | Vandaveer
Washington D.C. alt-folk duo hit their stride.
Formerly the solo project of singer-songwriter Mark Charles Heidinger, Vandaveer officially becomes a duo with the full integration of second vocalist Rose Guerin, who first showed up on 2009's Divide and Conquer. The addition of Guerin's sugar-sweet harmonies and a generally fuller sound moves Dig Down Deep out of the solo-troubadour side of contemporary alt-folk and into the branch of the style indebted to the likes of The Band and other pioneers of rootsy rock and roll. However, the album is blessedly free of any misguided attempts to play up Heidinger's folksy authenticity: this Kentucky native, now based in Washington D.C., sings and plays like an educated, middle-class guy who happens to own a copy of Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music. Think Blitzen Trapper (especially on the album's twin standouts, "The Nature of Our Kind" and the cello-driven "Spite"), not Uncle Tupelo. The album starts off a bit weak, with a string of pleasant but not particularly memorable ditties, but picks up steam toward the end as Heidinger and Guerin begin to decorate the solidly melodic songs with more elaborate harmonies and stray bits of backward piano, ghostly electronic shimmers and wah-wah guitar.
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