Quick, Before It Melts.

As far as concept albums go, basing a record on the imagined adventures of Melville Bell Grosvenor, editor of National Geographic magazine from 1957-'67, is probably as out there as you can get. At the hands of Andy Furgeson, singer-songwriter for Portland, Oregon's Bark Hide and Horn, Melville (whose grandfather was a guy named Alexander Graham Bell) takes a mystical journey through the perspective of the silent images in his magazine: an enslaved tree ant, a lovelorn tree snail, and the first chimp in space. That's pretty high concept for a debut album, but Furgeson, along with drummer Dusty Dybvig, multi-instrumentalist Brian Garvey, and Peter Valois on bass, manage to bring it together and make it work beautifully.

The resulting album, National Road (Boy Howdy Records), is one hell of a trip, soundtracked by Bark Hide and Horn's mix of bombastic trumpet, junkyard percussion, gritty strings, and mystical plinks and plunks that give the folk-rock template they work from a serious once-over. By the time their done with your head, you won't know which way is up, which road to take, and where the time has gone. Having listened to it without the benefit of digital display telling me what track number I was on, I was blown away how the first four songs just bled into one another. Epic. That's when things mellow out for the gorgeous "Treasure Of The Everglades" and you begin to appreciate the scope of Furgeson's songwriting talent. This is quite possibly the most fully-realized debut album I've heard all year. If you liked the Son, Ambulance album I heralded last month, if you like the idea of Wilco and Arcade Fire pureed in a blender, then you're going to love this.

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.: Bark Hide And Horn :.
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