'So Familiar' makes bluegrass bearable

Perhaps best known for starring in “The Jerk” (1979), “Cheaper by the Dozen” (2003) and “The Pink Panther” (2006), Steve Martin is much more famous for being a movie star than a musician. The accomplished comedy actor's musical career, however, has been a long and impressive one. He has been putting out albums since his 1977 debut, “Let’s Get Small,” and has racked up multiple platinum releases since then.

For his two most recent projects, “Love Has Come for You” (2013) and the recently released “So Familiar” (2015), Martin has teamed up with Edie Brickell of Edie Brickell & New Bohemians fame. Edie Brickell & New Bohemians’ “Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars” (1988) reached No. 4 on the Billboard 200 in the year of its release, but the group subsequently focused on producing music with less pop influence. Incidentally, Brickell met Paul Simon while playing on “Saturday Night Live” (1975 - present) in 1988, marrying the legendary folk singer four years later.

As for Brickell’s work with Martin, it is a pleasant hybrid of primarily bluegrass, with country and folk influences featuring prominently among other genres. It should be noted that this reviewer does not use the word “pleasant” lightly when describing bluegrass music; he lectures his father on the myriad reasons to dislike bluegrass every time his father uses the car radio to foist his misguided love of the genre onto him. Yet, if there were ever a case to be made for the merits of this little-loved genre, “So Familiar” would be it.

Brickell and Martin won a Grammy for Best American Roots Song in 2013 for “Love Has Come for You.” Their album of the same name spent 18 weeks at the top of the Bluegrass Albums chart and reached No. 21 on the Billboard 200. It could be said, then, that neither musician is new to accolades or the spotlight.

Remarkably, “So Familiar” in no way reflects this reality. While the album cover looks like it could be the movie poster for a typical Martin rom-com (thus implying the excess of a Hollywood production), the album features rather understated performances from both Brickell and Martin. One might expect Martin to make use of his commendable vocal chops here, but instead he contents himself with plucking on his banjo, at which he is no slouch. Brickell takes the lead on vocals throughout the album, dynamically affecting her voice from breathy and sensual to heavy and sad to light and happy depending on the song's subject matter, which spans everything from love, loss, drinking and more.

The album’s titular song, “So Familiar,” is immediately endearing. With a banjo plucking its way down the instrument’s range, a bouncy bass and a light percussion -- almost as if it were just someone’s hands dancing atop a table -- “So Familiar” is upbeat without becoming saccharine. The song is repetitive but only enough to be to be true to its name (rather than lazy). Indeed, listeners will be familiar with the song’s cadences by its end. This is the perfect song to put on for a road trip or in the background of a montage of the American countryside, so effortlessly does it conjure images of “down home” wholesomeness -- which is to say, it conjures the most cliché-yet-heartwarming images.

There are, of course, weak points on the album. For example, “I’m By Your Side” includes the line, “You can look in the mirror and never see yourself,” which is either disturbingly cliché or magically brilliant depending on the listener’s point of view. What’s more, most of the songs run shorter than three minutes; these short tracks can sometimes feel only half-realized. As with “So Familiar,” however, these songs also tend to use repetition for atmosphere, so making them longer may just detract from their beauty.

None of the tracks is particularly adventurous, but all of them are so unwaveringly true to their genre that it hardly matters. More than anything else, this is good, old-fashioned, homemade music. It may sound like a detox from the filtered squeezes, 808s and synthesizers of modern pop music, but that doesn’t mean listeners won't enjoy it.

https://play.spotify.com/album/2PuPvrNyKJlWMdnUFZDVjT