nothin Swamp Yankee Sings On Cracked Foundation | New Haven Independent

Swamp Yankee Sings On Cracked Foundation

Lucy Gellman Photo

Swamp Yankee.

Lantern Hill” begins with the drone of a guitar, a cello shaking out an eerie melody in its upper register. It’s somehow tense and peaceful at the same time. It then settles into a swinging melody that still doesn’t quite lose the paradox from the song’s opening minute. It feels old as the hills, but still unsettled. It’s there in a well-chosen note, an atmospheric sound hovering in the background. It’s there in the instruments themselves, the guitar and cello in the same range, weaving in and out of each other, making a big sound. And it’s the opening number from Pyrrhotite, the latest release from New Haven’s own Swamp Yankee.

Swamp Yankee is composed of Danny Ravizza on guitar and John Longyear on cello, here with an assist from Patrick Dalton, who’s credited with microphones and tech.” Pyrrhotite is an iron sulfide mineral that undergoes a chemical reaction when exposed to water. The resulting mineral, a sulfate, takes up more space than the iron sulfide did. This bit of information made the news in a big way when it was discovered that pyrrhotite mixed into the concrete foundations of tens of thousands of newer homes constructed in Connecticut was causing those foundations to fail. Pyrrhotite Plague is Killing the American Dream,” ran the headline of a Hartford Courant editorial on May 28, 2017, and the scale of that claim is justified, as people who bought homes a few years ago now find them crumbling out from under them. Fixing it can cost more than the house is worth, and it’s money the residents don’t have. The houses are turning into ruins. And the residents feel abandoned because they are,” the editorial stated.

That Swamp Yankee would use an album title to call attention to a social problem isn’t new. The duo’s 2016 release, Kelo v. New London, is named after the eminent domain case in which the city of New London removed people from their houses to clear the way for a large redevelopment project that then never happened.

But the nature of the problems Swamp Yankee calls attention to and the music they play have a deeper connection. The backwoods swamp ragas” they play are inspired by John Fahey, who was inspired in turn by the gnarlier end of the blues that runs through Appalachia and the Deep South. The way New Londoners lost their homes for a public project is like the way people lost their homes in New Haven for highways a generation ago — and like the way people lost their homeplaces to the Tennessee Valley Authority when they built dams and flooded farms. The houses crumbling in the Quiet Corner of Connecticut are on the scale of a natural disaster, like the flooding in West Virginia in 2016.

It makes sense to dip into the deep well of the music of Old Weird America to talk about pyrrhotite, and the music does it well. Pyrrotite (Wine and Roses)” bristles with anger and futility. The closer, Song for Nero,” starts off almost happy-go-lucky, then passes through a phase of serious anxiety that lingers even when the upbeat melody that began the song returns.

The album reaches its hypnotic apex on Oeuvre de Oggins (in F),” which finds Ravizza and Longyear unspooling a melody in slow motion over a galloping rhythm paired with a glacial drone. Time speeds up, time slows, in the way that it can with Appalachian fiddle music or a long blues. And where other parts of the album head straight into the anger, here the music overflows with sympathy, with understanding, and maybe even a banged-up kind of hope. Not that everything will be better in time, but that there are connections to be made. We’re so used to dividing ourselves. It’s conservatives versus liberals, Republicans versus Democrats. It’s the heartland versus the coast, South versus North. But when we lose our homes the places we were born and raised, the places we hoped to live out our lives — whether it’s by the government or a big company or a hurricane or a flood — those lines suddenly don’t seem to mean very much. Experience overrides ideology. The catastrophes that befall us don’t have to isolate us. They can bring us closer together.

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