Americana UK
URL: http://americana-uk.com/alpha-mule-peripheral-vision-giant-meteor-records-2016
Eric Stoner and Joe Forkan, both visual artists by day, come together to form a potent partnership much greater than its parts. Their website claims influence by rock, blues, bluegrass, folk and traditional country and to be honest, that is a fair summing up of the variety of styles on this wonderful album, albeit that it only ever tempts us toward bluegrass, never actually quite taking us through the door.
The banjo is used in a relaxed form, usually clawhammer, and there is no fiddle. Starting with Corpus Christi, a wild-west-Marty-Robbins-evoking tale of travelling from Los Angeles to the eponymous Texan town, the album moves smoothly through the gears, treating us to a happy, banjo led ditty a-la-John Hartford (On The Moon), blues (Pavlov), and even a beautiful guitar instrumental (The Ballad of Huell Howser), which actually disappoints when you find out the title (So what is the story of Huell Howser? Who is he?); if you don’t follow the titles through, just listen, you will be much happier.
There are even touches reminiscent of Eels: distorted, lo-fi, telephone voice and happy-but-serious songs, especially Short Man’s Room, which sounds like it could have been lifted right off ‘A Man Called E’. The centre piece is actually the title track, Peripheral Vision, a classic-country sounding love song, which could quite easily have been recorded by Don Williams in another time. Having only been together for 3 years, Alpha Mule sound like they have been around forever – and that’s a good thing! The vocals are somewhere between Jon Sebastian and Nick Cave, thick, yet not too deep and able to sound serious, even when attempting humour. The instrumentation is lush, but not overpowering: never inappropriate. Occasional reverbed resonator guitar and even trumpet at times – never out of place, always helping to enforce the catchy melodies, each instance like the BFG’s long dream trumpet, blowing the tunes further into your ear, so you may well wake up humming them.
For two guys who only have music as a second career, the playing is flawless; so much so, that maybe we should ask if maybe the visual arts are their second jobs? On second thoughts, everything sounds so relaxed and easy that this could well be the product of many a chill-out session after a hard day in the dark room. Hopefully this duo will take off, but if they do, fingers crossed that it doesn’t become any more serious or intense – effortless and laid back is the way this album works and the way Alpha Mule’s music works.
Summary 8/10
Relaxed, effortless mix of acoustic folk, country and old time, creating stick-in-the-head tunes.
No Depression
URL: http://nodepression.com/album-review/alpha-mules-stunning-debut
The charmingly dubbed Alpha Mule, a Southern California based project featuring the songwriting and musical talents of Eric Stoner and Joe Forkan, has released a revelatory ten song collection entitled Peripheral Vision. There are some notable guest musicians working on the project, namely Calexico’s Joey Burns and Jacob Valenzuela, but this slate of original tunes largely focuses on the talents of Stoner and Forkan. The duo never disappoints. These tunes draw, naturally, from a wealth of traditional blues, country, and bluegrass idioms to weave their magic, sport some truly incisive songwriting, but likewise make excellent use of more modern sounds to help realize the potential behind each song. There’s no sense of trapping butterflies under glass here – Alpha Mule’s songs are never so studied as to be rendered inert and there’s an intimacy that comes across here, even when there’s a full band at work, that will endear the musicians and their songs to a wide cross-section of listeners…
…Alpha Mule has given us a stunning debut with this release and it’s hard to not be eager for what they may do next.
Divide and Conquer
4.2 out of 5 – Top Album
URL: http://www.divideandconquermusic.com/indie-music-album-reviews/alpha-mule-peripheral-vision
The faraway pedal steel guitars, the banjos and the roiling acoustics recall trains and the railroad earth,spaces between great cities and small towns, open-road longing with a slight —ever-so-slight— desperation humming beneath it all. Alpha Mule can do that in song, instrumentation and unexpected-yet-hummable phrases like “She stitched up the harness while I was looking in her eyes.” Muso types reductively label them Americana but we down here at TW say the willowy din created by this Los Angeles duo—which includes former Tucsonan Joe Forkan— is bluegrass and folk and rock ’n’ roll and country and Dave Alvin and Giant Sand and the great Sonoran Desert…
TUCSON WEEKLY
From the distant train whistle that signals the first track's onset, you get the immediate sense that Peripheral Vision may be an ironic title for an album that casts a direct and purposeful gaze into the bloodshot, whiskey-drenched eyes of the American West. From its players (including Calexico's Joey Burns and Jacob Valenzuela) to its producer (legendary Wavelab Studio producer, Craig Schumacher) Peripheral Vision was destined to celebrate a diverse catalog of American music in a way that only its most steeped and talented stalwarts can. Compliments an impressive set of original songs–all tuned in purposefully harmonious counterpoints to the dissonant chords of friendship and loneliness, discovery and loss–this full-bodied catalog gets an unexpected and refreshing repagination. Put simply, you'd be a fool to look only sideways at this album's craftsmanship, because in doing so, you'd miss its superb artistry...