nothin The Bargain Goes Coast To Coast | New Haven Independent

The Bargain Goes Coast To Coast

West Coast Time,” by The Bargain

The Bargain, safely separated and masked as bandits or raccoons, perform West Coast Time” just for you. Be well, and The Bargain loves you.

Posted by The Bargain on Monday, April 20, 2020

A guitar delivers a gleaming, precise hook, accented by a shining mandolin. There’s no bass, no drums. They don’t need to be there. The vibe the two instruments make is enough. I want to live nocturnal / And see the sun rise with open eyes,” the singer’s voice interjects. Do you know what I mean?”

That’s how West Coast Time,” the first track from The Bargain’s new EP, The Ammer Session begins, and as soon as it starts, it has moved on somewhere else. Everyone is asleep / and I’m traveling, traveling on the road,” the singer continues. It’s the road along the coast / these are the things that mean the most.”

The Bargain is a collaboration among three New Haven-area musicians who are already established acts in their own right — Frank Critelli, Shandy Lawson, and Muddy Rivers. As the band posted on its Facebook page in February, In January 2019, Muddy Rivers showed up at the home of Frank Critelli with a bottle of whiskey and a guitar. Shandy Lawson arrived soon after. The three made a bargain with the Devil and each other to write down, record, and perform the songs they lassoed while sitting around the kitchen table.” The joke about supergroups is that they usually aren’t, and there’s often some truth to that; with some bands, the whole can end up being less than the sum of its parts.

Not so with the Bargain. Whether the product of a lot of experiment and deliberation, or whether they just fell into it, the Bargain as a group produces an effortless, dreamy atmosphere that magnifies each of the musicians’ talents. As a singer and songwriter, Critelli is no stranger to knotty, poetic lines, but he has rarely sounded as relaxed as he does singing with Lawson and Rivers. On guitar, Rivers crafts parts that succeed in laying down the rhythm while also providing hooks and counterpoint to the unspooling melodies Critelli sings. And Lawson’s mandolin creates space, giving the sound of the songs a depth and dimensionality for the ear to get lost in.

So Secret Garden” lopes along on an easy swing that Rivers embroiders first with a cascading hook and some delicious tap work. Lawson keeps the rhythm going and bears witness while Critelli lets lyric after lyric fall as it should. (“If you want to put time in a bottle, we can have an endless summer,” Critelli promises.) Tell Em All” finds the band strutting as if they really did have a big rhythm section behind them, though the musicians deliver more than enough energy to cover the bases, especially in Rivers’s choice of chords. And The Road Ahead” is true to its name. Well it’s been too long since I’ve heard the hum of the road under the tires,” Critelli sings. With the windows rolled down and the radio loud, and my eyes up in the sky.” In that moment, the band speaks for us all.

Lawson, Rivers, Critelli, from the band’s Facebook page.

In February the group was performing around the area, at Best Video, Cafe 9, and Three Sheets. The musicians had gigs planned for the spring as well, until the pandemic cancelled them all. Being a small nimble group that needed no amplification to make the sound they needed, the group found ways to start getting its music out anyway, through a series of Facebook videos (see above). When not practicing or playing, they still found ways to get together.

Wait for the end of days with The Bargain. We have beer. And we love you,” the band wrote on its Facebook page in April. But the days keep coming, and now The Bargain has recorded The Ammer Sessions, which captures the group’s warm sound just in time for the weather to start really heating up.

The Bargain’s The Ammer Session is available on Bandcamp.

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