Americana has been making quite a big comeback in the last couple of years, and if you’re curious as to why, you need to take a peek at what the underground has been submitting lately – and particularly what indie folk duo Mike Stinson and Johnny Irion are releasing this coming April in Working My Way Down. Much like their fellow underground artists making big waves on the other side of the dial this season, Stinson and Irion are driving home an Americana revival on the strength of bold rhythms, roots-inspired licks, bluesy vocals, and an almost postmodern-style lyrical bite, and to say that their new album Working My Way Down is a perfect amalgamation of the aforementioned influences would be putting it mildly.
The title track, “Brand New Love Song,” “Taking No For an Answer,” and “The Bottle and Me” provide us with a great melding of country and folk themes inside of songs that follow a pretty experimental blueprint, each in their own unique way, but none of these compositions sounds even remotely scattered or aesthetically overreaching in the least. If anything, there’s a wonderful blend of stylizations on this disc that I would have hoped to hear out of Stinson and Irion’s mainstream rivals this spring, but unfortunately have yet to experience outside of Working My Way Down.
As instrumentally evocative as “LA Cowboy,” “You Came a Long Way from St. Louis,” “Only Friend I Ever Had,” and “Stranger Here Myself” are, the vocals these songs feature are always the most vibrant focal point for us to tune-in to. Stinson and Irion trade on chemistry throughout this performance, with Stinson at times capturing more of the spotlight than his counterpart does, but had they not shared the stage as democratically as they did in Working My Way Down, I’m not sure that it would be nearly as evocative as it is in the form we find it in here.
There’s an awesome fluidity to this tracklist that makes the music feel almost operatic in a couple of key spots, but I wouldn’t go as far as to say that Working My Way Down is a progressive effort. “Cosmic Candy” segues into “Taking No For an Answer” and later “Brand New Love Song” as though the three songs were always meant to be joined in some kind of classic American medley, but whether we’re listening to them in the order Stinson and Irion intended or simply cherry-picking through the tracks one at a time, I think the emotional impact of their narrative here tends to remain the same.
2023 is now in full swing, and from where I sit, I do believe you’d be hard-pressed to find another alternative Americana collaboration quite as enthralling as Mike Stinson and Johnny Irion’s Working My Way Down is before the start of summer. This pair of singer/songwriters are pushing the boundaries as much as they can in this record, and if they can find a way to continue their sonic experimentations without alienating fans of a more streamlined sound, I think they’ll have a good chance at breaking through to the mainstream early on in their career as a duo. Kim Muncie