Foot Ox
A Lighthouse with Silver Dog Eyes
Ernest Jennings Record Co.
Sweetly, with just a touch of worry, Foot Ox slyly asks, “I still do it for you, don’t I,” almost wincing for a response. Gleaned from the lovely “Witness and Tide,” just one of the lulling, lazy indie-folk gems off A Lighthouse with Silver Dog Eyes, the engaging, endearingly cockeyed new album from Foot Ox, it’s a loaded question. Patiently awaiting an answer, the unhurried track moseys along, perhaps headed for heartbreak, knocking over everyone it sees with a feather. It tugs gently at the elbow with fair-haired acoustic strum, sauntering piano, dry, slightly warped vocals, and faint howls of wounded pedal steel, knowing it has other places to be.
Dusty, full of wistful charm and slightly skewed, yet immediately accessible, melodies, A Lighthouse with Silver Dog Eyes goes on a “Pretty Pimpin’” walkabout through the American west like Kurt Vile, ending up wherever the day takes it. Daydreaming the time away, lost in surreal and nostalgic reveries, Foot Ox confronts life’s vagaries and challenges with a gentle shrug of the shoulders, maybe feeling the sting internally more than they let on, experiencing that sense of being overwhelmed and trying to keep it contained.
Teague Cullen, who’s recorded a wealth of material under other guises and in various solo outings, leads the loose collective as they cycle through the easy, clear hooks, golden, countryfied spin, and gasoline rainbow spill of “Horseshoe,” its experimental, cinematic outro running a broken projector in an abandoned movie house. Letting the casual pop sensibility of “Arizona” slide over snappy drumming, Foot Ox then moves a fleet of luxurious strings into the affecting and arresting closer “Desert Rat,” its free-falling intimacy as guardedly revealing as a diary entry. Unrequited young love is still great fodder for the kind of tidy, alluring songwriting found here. Just hold on loosely.
Every pocket-sized and cozy, yet not altogether comfortable song a seduction of innocence and truth, A Lighthouse with Silver Dog Eyes blooms like a field of wildflowers, going from the briskly paced, catchy opener “Owl Cries” – seemingly perfumed with melodic honeysuckle – to the bittersweet flow and pull of “Bleached Yellow,” the gently unraveling ballad “Cowhand,” and the graceful swing and sway of “Bed of Violets.” Snippets of conversation left in, often at a song’s end, allow sneak peaks inside the recording room, lending even more of a mellow, laid-back vibe to the proceedings.
Be it ever so humble, gentle warble flying about, there’s no place like A Lighthouse with Silver Dog Eyes, which should be talked about in the same breath as anything by Waxahatchee or Big Thief.
