Friends of Crabwalk Dept.: My old childhood buddy Josh Caffery is one of the centers of gravity in a certain sector of the south Louisiana music scene. (It happens to be my favorite sector: the smart young folks who are trying to reclaim Cajun music from its own Scylla and Charybdis, old-timey stagnation and lowest-common-denominator commercialism.)

He helped found the Red Stick Ramblers a few years back, then produced the best snapshot of the scene, the terrific compilation Allons Boire Un Coup. (It won Best Cajun Album from Offbeat not long ago. And it really is terrific — the title track is hypnotic, and big talents like Cedric Watson, the Lost Bayou Ramblers, the Pine Leaf Boys, Racines, and just about every Savoy are accounted for.)

Now Josh has taken on the job of chaperone/guitarist for south Louisiana’s version of Menudo, a.k.a. Feufollet. (I kid because I love!) Feufollet gained notice as a band of young kids a few years back, having been one of the first cultural outputs from intensive French-language instruction in Louisiana public schools. (Check those early album covers.) But they’re all college-age by now, and they have a new record coming out on Valcour on April 15 called Cow Island Hop, and you should buy it.

My copy is in the mail, so I can’t do a full review, but Valcour has posted an MP3 of one song, “Femme L’a Dit,” and it makes me hopeful. The melody sounds a lot like the Red Stick Ramblers and, to be honest, doesn’t even sound particularly Cajun — more like a soulful French chanson. Anna Laura Edmiston — one of the few females in the scene — has grown into her voice nicely and can pull off the full-throated-diva thing better than she used to.

But the greatness comes after the vocals end and the horns come up for a New Orleans-style rave up, with tuba, sax, trumpet, and fiddle all playing and counterplaying. Historically speaking, there’s been much less interchange between Cajun music and New Orleans music than you might imagine, and I’m all for new sounds that can reach a broader audience while staying true to their roots.

And this may be just my longstanding desire to merge Cajun music and indie rock talking — but if they’d just loosened up the sound a touch more, the horn section could have had the ramshackle, tumbling sound of perhaps the finest Louisiana-bred rock musician of the past 15 years, Ruston’s Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel. My biggest complaint with most contemporary Cajun recorded music is that it’s too precise and well played and ends up with the sort of clean-room feel that you get listening to folk music on NPR. One of the things I loved about Allons Boire Un Coup is that it’s an album of drinking songs and, on several tracks, it sounds like the musicians had taken the theme to heart in the studio, if you catch my meaning.

(More Feufollet tracks at their MySpace. And their label, Valcour, led by Joel Savoy, is also the place to buy Allons Boire or fine releases from Cedric Watson, Cedric/Corey Ledet, or the Figs — which feature Josh’s lovely wife Claire on banjo.)

30 March 2008

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