Life is so often governed by sea changes, those massive scale events that happen almost suddenly, but the world had never stopped changing under the surface.
Mystic Country by Caleb Stine and the Revelations represents a sea change. As ever, Caleb sings directly – you can glean certain information quickly – but, underneath the water’s surface, down in the depths, there are deeper truisms, deeper concepts.
It’s billed as something of a concept album, and that certainly manifests itself, both narratively and sonically. The Revelations create wide-open soundscapes in the story’s panoramic West, muddying the sound when it goes through the swamps, and throughout, static pervades. It is, at its core, a record that concerns itself with how to survive being human.
Caleb shared that the record attempts to answer the question, “How do we survive the Pre-Post-apocalypse?” which is, on its own, a heady question to consider, even within the context of a philosophical or scientific treatise. It begs the question, “What even is a pre-post-apocalypse?” To me, as a listener, it evokes a sense that we are always in a state of apocalypse, and that a part of living – of existing – is learning how to come to terms with entropy, with dying.
And if I had to guess Caleb’s answer from this record, he might paraphrase Patti Smith, “Love one another and make sure you say it.” This represents an oversimplification of the deep ideas expressed throughout the record in the lyrics, the music, the tones, but sometimes the simplest answer provides the cleanest definition.
As it pertains to the music, to the sound, Caleb has written his strongest record to date. From the opening radio strains on “Juniper Antenna” to the closing gratitude of “Thank You”, Caleb uses his storytelling gifts – honed through Stoop Storytelling, his own music, and a host of other sources – to extraordinary effect, providing little details that expand the image while tightening it.
Caleb’s music has often rendered comparisons to classic folk troubadours like Townes van Zandt, Neil Young, and Kris Kristofferson. On Mystic Country, there are moments of folk, but the sound is as much influenced by jazz, rock and roll, and the blues. At times, even, I can hear the sound of the mountains, the low buzz of the wind over the plains – place defines the sound as much as genre.
As previously mentioned, Caleb’s trademark directness abounds, especially on early standouts like “Addition” and “Confident”. “Addition”, with its slow-burning introduction, provides the solution for surviving the ongoing apocalypse, decrying “the oldest trick in the book / is evil convincing Brother to kill his Brother”. While this feels current, one of Caleb’s emphases is that this has always been and will continue to be a problem; until the human race learns to stop hating other humans, “division brings only confusion” and pain.
On “Confidence”, a swampy rock and roll song with a story to tell and a metaphor for going through the days, Caleb sings, “sometimes you get the demon / sometimes it gets you / sometimes you don’t know what to do / and maybe you’ll look back and wonder where it all went / but at least you’ll know you lived at all”. He follows this verse with the expansive and wildly beautiful, “The West”, in which Caleb speaksings through most of the song, adding to the American mythology found throughout Mystic Country, his voice punctuated by pleasant drones. Caleb and the Revelations explode again into rock and roll on “Released”, where the emphasis again shifts to society’s ills and the importance of awareness, both acknowledging privilege and the importance of finding release over time, of fighting to see the light (individually and within society).
My favorite song shifts, but as I write these words, I think “Jiro Dreams of Electric van Gogh” stands out. Caleb sings poetry – “the sun exploded on a field of corn”, “blue expanded from the riverside”, “a rhombus made of winter light” – as he also issues insights – “in the silence of this house / all my fears become cows / I milk them for their glowing powers:/ they’ve got powers of vision”. The song ends with the question, “Can I meet you face to face down here?”, reinforcing the record’s message for connection, and then ending with more interstellar noise. As a whole, “Jiro” is a microcosm of everything Caleb does best – it tells a story, provides perspective, and presents wild beauty.
Other moments of wild beauty are found throughout the record, including all of the characters Caleb discovers, but I would be remiss if I failed to mention grace and gratefulness of “Thank You”, a song that feels like a gift to parents of every stripe. I can imagine playing the song for my mother, my father, suffusing the phrase “Thank You” with additional meaning. So often, we say Thank You perfunctorily and without awareness, but it has a true love to it.
So, Thank you to Caleb Stine and the Revelations. For this vision of a record. For loving Baltimore. For sharing your faith in humanity.
Reader, go pick up Mystic Country as soon as you can, however you can. And then go sing along at your nearest possible convenience.
