Written by: Dave Cantrell

An accomplished guitar slinger who’s admittedly addicted to playing live, Douglas Keith is one of those musicians you’ve quite likely seen and/or heard you just don’t know you have. Since 2009 Sharon Van Etten’s right-hand six-string-shooter – after years of loaning out his talents to others all over New York City – Keith’s primary focus has always been exactly the same as almost every other hired-gun touring musician in the history of the rock’n’roll game: raise sufficient resources and one’s profile enough to support the dream of a solo career. The difference with Keith, as evidenced by new album Pony (his follow-up to 2010’s Here’s To Outliving Me and released Feb. 11th), is we won’t find him littering the side of the yellow brick road with all the other wannabe casualties that never quite made it far enough to enter the golden gates. Whether or not he’ll get his fair shot to join the ranks of those he’s worked for is open to conjecture – it’s a wickedly fickle business, after all – but there’s no question that the pony this guy’s riding in on here is bringing the goods necessary to gain him admission to the center stage spotlight club.

The record has gained early attention for the moody, sulfurous, J.Mascis-abetted “Pure Gold in the 70’s” and rightly so, with its wistful, luminescent nostalgia, its ominously lovely under-throb of yearning, and, of course, that solo, twisting and piercing its way through the second half of the song like some mad angel-headed hornet in love with lightning. A kind of emotional cousin to Smog’s “Cold-Hearted Old Times” and just as catchy, it’s a very lovely trophy to have shining in the center of one’s album, without a doubt, but with both Van Etten and members of Megafaun along to help out, it’s no surprise that it’s hardly the sole award-winner.

Were one in need of a connective theme that binds the nine tracks on this album into one solid piece it would be the singer-guitarist’s easy songwriting virtuosity, a core spark of quality that finds us following with rapt curiosity as Keith strays from the sure-footed Band Iver opener “Harvest Home” through the insistent groove rocker “Long Shot” that eschews handclaps-as-accent and just adds them to the drum kit and breaks out a stabby synth to keep our ears on their toes, to the heartland strummer “The Apostles” where Keith’s voice adopts a grainy, almost apologetic subtext, all the better to evince the regret that comes with calmly calling bullshit on a now-ex-lover’s righteousness. Though some variant or another of the tag ‘americana’ is the most likely of any to be stuck to this record – there is something of a roots rock feel to many of the tracks here – the truth is there’s just too much depth and dimensionality to pin it down so easily. Besides, even at their slowest, the songs on Pony are too sprightly for all that. They rather shine.

The ping and thump of “You Cant’ Stand To Be Alone,” straddling one of those rousing and immediate rhythm tracks – you know, the kind that luringly pulls you in straight off, with piano and tambourine attached for extra oomph – combines a falsetto’ed emphasis of hook to a simple stark truth of lyric (..if you were smart, you were smart, you were smart, you wouldn’t bother gettin’ dressed) that makes it the other obvious single, while for that winning mixture of down home, boogie-lite poignancy, pristine, inventive production values and bristling comic effect, we have “The Weather’s Fucking Awful,” surely one of the finest (I should really stay off the) road songs ever recorded. Plus it sports another outro guitar run, this time courtesy Keith himself. Then there’s the early-MTV-era alterna-pop rocker “Black Metal Black” that suggests by melodic implication that Homestead Records come back and claim what’s rightfully theirs, mid-tempo jangle and midwest Paisley Underground touches and all.

In industry parlance a ‘sleeper hit,’ Pony is indeed a sneaker wave of a record that one would be well-advised not to turn one’s back on. Of course, it probably doesn’t matter. Thing’s gonna knock you over regardless.