Alec Ounsworth: "This Is Not My Home (After Bruegel)"

Bruegel the Elder, we’ll go ahead and call it, minus the H and all: in all a more suitable allusion here than in anything those schmucks from Titus Andronicus could come up with and generally less cloying than a Fleet Foxes cover. Swarthy but lithe, croupy but cathartic, the first single off Alec Ounsworth’s soon-to-exist Mo Beauty is chock full of fleeting microadventures—like selling apes to military personnel and intoning that cops are allergic to the ocean, I think—but never seems overstuffed, something Clap Your Hands Say Yeah pulled off before handing the reigns to Dave Friedman, who can’t fucking help himself. No, Friedman would take the Bruegel mention literally, pouring rebel sounds from the sacred clouds, making every moment beheld to some eschatological clamor—instead, recorded in New Orleans with local musicians, “This Is Not My Home (After Bruegel)” feels, above all, balanced. Stamped with requisite plaintive horns and a masked sense of urgency, the song never lapses into bravado to push to the climactic bridge and never, thank heavens, uses its locale as an excuse to force-feed us atmosphere. Even Ounsworth, who at one point goes so mush-mouthed it’s like he’s parodying his old band, is able to retain his niche-imbibed swagger while still sounding excited about how well it all’s coming together (i.e. not like a d-bag). The song’s a simple success, is all, a big little whetting for an album that by all accounts should blow but probably won’t from a guy in that big little band that by all accounts shouldn’t have started to blow but did.