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The core of the M Shanghai String Band, the central something that makes them not just good but special, is the dichotomy personified by its two main songwriters. Austin Hughes and Matt Schickele, both veterans of the New York indie scene of the 90s (Hughes with the band Very Pleasant Neighbor, and Schickele with Beekeeper), complement one another brilliantly, though as performing artists they could not be more different. Hughes, tall, lanky, a swing dancer and seemingly a dustbowl figure from another era, has a breathy, seductive, slightly raspy but always tuneful tenor voice, and at the end of nearly every phrase his face is overcome with smile. Of all the performers I’ve watched, he comes closest to embodying pure joy while practicing his craft (his nearest competitor, Rose Thomson, is also a member of the M Shanghais). Schickele is a touch stockier, softly handsome with a shock of red hair, perpetually scruffy beard, and thoughtful deep blue eyes. He’s a chess player, now brooding, now playful, and generally a more earthbound presence, though prone to a spell of goofiness every now and then. If Hughes looks as though he’s going to spontaneously achieve nirvana each time he croons, Schickele, eyes slightly averted, perfectly nailing every change and every note with his quirky, soulful voice, can grace the stage as a natural performer. But at times I think he'd prefer to be home in his studio, dreaming up weird chord progressions or better still, working on his garden.

On the M Shanghais’ brand new CD, From The Air (Red Parlor), these stark contrasts are delineated, more than ever before, in song. Hughes strives toward the universal, using mostly standard chord voicings and progressions and fashioning epic American narratives, some from the heartland, and some right from the country’s urban core and M Shanghai’s Brooklyn base of operations. On the previous CD, the self-released Up From The Ground Below, Hughes came close to offering bona fide entries to the only-occasionally-evolving American Songbook. “Death Don’t Want Us Yet,” “Krazy Kat and Lazy Sue,” and “Blood,” all glowed with heartland authenticity, but somehow fell just short of timelessness. His best offering on that album, “The Devil You and Me,” appears in a newly recorded version on From The Air, where it is in fact, one of Hughes’ lesser contributions. With sole songwriting credit for six of the album’s fourteen songs, and joint credit for two others, Hughes has attained a prolific high water mark, and his signal to noise ratio is staggering. “Anita Jean,” “No Home in this World,” “Under the Riverbed,” “Good Night,” and yes, “Devil You And Me,” leap off the disk at first listen and become instant classics. They are the kind of songs that are anthologized, sung around campfires a hundred years from today. Hughes’ songwriting is tighter here than on the previous album, his melodies more infectious, and he has more completely channeled an eternal American essence, perhaps the spirit of the Midwest, in song after song.

My favorite is “Anita Jean,” a tale of a small town beauty with appetite and aspiration for a bigger life. Hughes deftly and indelibly sets the scene, with painterly economy:

The riverbank Ohio saw prosperity’s arrival
But the road to fortune ran between the graves
Blame the coal, blame the clay
Or chimney’s belchin’ darkness into day
The potter boys would break to watch
The swaying of her hips, the tick- tock
Hypnotized their body clocks to chime
Sing out young Anita Jean
The brightest gem that Hancock County ever seen

In the chorus, Hughes is joined for the first of several times on the album by Philippa Thompson, whose sultry, relaxed voice blends with his to create a union of touching restraint and clarity.

Anita Jean with style and grace
Sail above an ordinary place
Into the starlight that blinds your way

Right on the word “ordinary,” after a chord progression that has dipped into most diatonic degrees of F major, a secondary dominant – G major – softly depicts in sound the transcendence described in the lyrics. The modest chromatic touch and the pretty, nostalgic voices combine to add the faintest hint of something – is it hopelessness? – to the narrative. There’s a subtext below the gleaming surface – a sly nod to the listener that Anita is ultimately trapped in the narrow world she so longs to leave behind.

“No Home in This World,” is a spiritual, sung so sweetly by Hughes that it’s quite possible to miss the fervent religious severity of its message:

When the storm clouds are blowing through, you will know
That you have no home in this world
When the darkness does bury you, you will see
Light for your long journey
Lost like an orphan broken, you have no home in this world
Glory the gates be open, Heaven hold you sacred pearl

Each chorus (beginning with “Lost&rdquo grows in accompanimental intensity, with Hughes singing solo the first time, and M Shanghai’s embarrassment of vocal riches gradually piling on for each successive pass, until finally a full throated choir has come to be, blaring out the final chorus a cappella with unimpeachable gospel wholesomeness. This fancy choral display is rich and clear on recording, but not quite a match for the show-stopping live version I’ve been fortunate enough to hear several times now. In general, the album’s recordings are excellent representatives of songs that are most at home on the concert (or tavern) stage. Where the recordings fall slightly short, I think, are in the rollicking big-harmony choruses. An aesthetic is at play here that dramatically prioritizes the lead voice at the expense of the supporting singers, while in the live shows these voices are an inseparable and joyful mass. Also, occasionally the lead vocal track is mixed too low for my taste. But the clarity and depth of the overall mix – no small feat in the face of dueling fiddles, guitars, banjos, a harmonica, mandolin, musical saw, spoons and more – is superb, and more than compensates for my minor quibbles.

Hughes’s other songs are all worthy of mention, including an arresting lullaby, “Goodnight,” a New Orleans style sultry blues dirge sung by Thompson (“Bus Called Cemetery&rdquo, the electrifying old-West style romp about a tic-tac-toe-playing fowl in Chinatown, “Tic Tac Toe Chicken,” and the haunting lament of an anonymous toiler on the Brooklyn Bridge, “Under the Riverbed.” To a one these songs are boldly poetic, musically precise, economical and inspired, and signal both Hughes’ intimacy with a range of roots musics, and the end of his apprenticeship in the genre.

Schickele, generally speaking, is not a universalist. His songs are quirky and personal, his chord progressions unusual, his lyrics at times obscure. This man would seem to have no business frolicking on stage with an oversized bluegrass outfit. On the M Shanghais’ first album he did, in fact, make several gestures toward the American canon. “Count Ten,” is an enduring folksong tearjerker, perhaps more Irish at heart than American, but one worthy of the above-mentioned anthologies. “Money Up,” is a first person stomp sung by a ruffian too good for anything but drink, and “Is It True” is a somewhat-demented deception toe-tapper with banjos ablazin’. On Up From The Ground Below (whose title is a refrain of “Count Ten,&rdquo then, Schickele undertook an apprenticeship of his own, and made sincere overtures to whatever genre it is that the M Shanghais call home. On From The Air, however, such overtures are mostly gone. Schickele’s rejoined the intimate and the weird, no longer donning his uber-public face. The album’s opening song and title track gives us Schickele the awed observer, a character we met before on his solo album April November in the song “Sweet Anonymity.” “From The Air’s” full lyric is:

I've heard them claim there's no new beauty, only resay what's always been
Take to the sky, over the cloud sea that a hundred years ago we'd never seen

If the weight's strong when you're grounded, rise above into the clear
Watch the big things getting smaller and the small ones disappear

When you're rising over treetops, over clouds, there's no shade
Like the view from the highest mountain, but the mountain isn't there

I have glided over cities, over mountains, sea & shore
If you ask me how they do it I would answer 'I don't know'

What a beautiful land from the air
What a beautiful land from the air

The song begins innocuously, with each of the rather sedentary verses separated by restrained fiddling. The chorus (which happens only twice in the song’s unusual verse-verse-verse-verse-chorus-chorus form), on the other hand, taps the power of the full vocal ensemble. Performed live this comes as a brilliant, awakening surprise – a sonic enactment of the awe described in the lyrics. On the album, as I’ve mentioned, I think the backing vocals are mixed a touch too low, but it’s still good fun. In its subject matter – the visual glory of air travel – it is one of a number of tunes on the album whose urban or modern topics separate them from Hughes’ heartland ballads (even Hughes’ song about Brooklyn is a remnant of a distant, dusty past). Another is Philippa Thompson’s rousing “Manhattan Lover,” about the woes of inter-boro relationships in the big city (“I ain’t that far on the Q train I promise you.&rdquo It is this mixed allegiance to true American roots and the band’s own New York City extraction, a corollary to the friction between Hughes’ public prairie earnestness and Schickele’s eclectic interior views (the Paul/John phenomenon, if you will) that completely declassifies the M Shanghai String Band. What bin do you stick them in? I truly don’t know, and that’s the marvel of their thing.

Schickele has a somewhat secondary role on this CD, in the face of Hughes’ veritable explosion of A-side material. In addition to “From The Air” he has only two other songs, “Black Forest,” and “Second Hand.” The first feels like an outtake from a Schickele solo effort made rich with understated strings, a difficult song of quiet panic:

No one is here, there's nothing to see
Haven't heard a bird or felt a breeze
Stay calm; bad dreams begin, and usually end
Black Forest is deep and we're drowning

Neither the words nor the tune – with its unexpected twists and turns and its occasional harshness – would have come from Hughes’ pen in a hundred years. The song is one of the album’s most determined sleepers. Like much of Schickele’s solo music, it reveals its true depth and strength of conception and melody only on repeated hearings. I find myself imagining the musical interludes – comprised simply of the song’s tune without words – more often than I ever would have expected.

Schickele’s last offering on the album is “Second Hand,” a beautifully sweet ode to fleeting, unlikely romance and living in the moment. His always-somewhat-melancholy voice finds its ideal partner here in the blissed-out girlish soprano of Rose Thomson, a singer with a small but entirely unique and ecstatic vocal instrument. The pairing is electric, and is a worthy foil to the rapturous but more subdued duo of Hughes and Thompson featured on “Anita Jean,” “Under The Riverbed,” and “Devil You and Me.” The Schickele-Thomson vocal pairing, with its kinetic high-low balancing act is stranger, almost exotic, and should get a few more numbers on the next CD. Thomson is a bit player on this new album, but her vocal intensity – and all the youthful zeal for life it communicates – adds an unmistakable spark to songs where it is only peripherally heard, including “No Home in this World,” “Manhattan Lover,” and “From the Air.” Thomson is herself a veteran of the almost-famous band Babe The Blue Ox, and a rather mesmerizing solo performer in her own right. It’s a testament to the depth of the M Shanghais that a force such as this spends much of her time on the bench.

There are of course, no true bench players in the band. Upright bassist Harrison Cannon contributes two fine songs, the up-tempo “Another Day on the Train,” and the touchingly naïve and direct love-song, “Happiness,” and his bar-room twang voice offers a refreshing change of feel. That voice is not entirely dissimilar to that of Corin See, who sings lead on Hughes’s “Vivian Girls.” After the two delightfully humorous numbers See sang on the first album, the traditional “Old Joe Clark,” and Al Heifitz’s brilliantly arch “Hit Me,” he tackles a more serious and strange subject here – the unsettling universe of outsider artist Henry Darger – with a subtle mock-drawl. Philippa Thompson has emerged as one of the key players in the ensemble, singing perhaps the sexiest leads on both “Bus Called Cemetery” and her original, “Manhattan Lover.” Her work on fiddle, musical saw, spoons, accordion, and back-up vocals is an essential component of the M Shanghais’ live show, and happily very well captured throughout this new disk. Even “Shakey” Dave Pollack, the band’s adroit harmonica man (and most captivating visual performer) has a star turn in the 40-second romp “Knob Creek Boogie.” Others contributing to the M Shanghais’ rich, now sublime and lush, now twangy string melange are the nearly demonic fiddler Glendon Jones, John Shanchuk and Patricia Hughes on banjos, and Richard Morris on mandolin (also the album’s producer). The level of musicianship is impeccable across the board, and the frequency of empty displays of virtuosity is mercifully low. Such rare moments are generally tightly woven into the fabric and meaning of a song, such as the furious two-fiddle ascending tremolo/glissando in “Devil You and Me,” a signifier of the protagonists’ fateful Faustian transaction. The gesture ends in an almost Webern-like assault of jagged, pointilistic fiddle scratches before the song’s chorus comes pounding forth for a final time.

With From The Air, the M Shanghais have made an album that is, at the end of the day, American to its core. From tragedies writ large and small, topographies spanning the reaches of Hancock County to the heartland of Brooklyn (both past and present), from Hughes’ expansive epic ballads to Schickele’s contemplative inner monologues, from the mainstream sounds of American bluegrass – fiddles, banjos, guitars and mandolins – to the extremes of the American sonic imagination (firmly entrenched in the culture since, and before, the 1952 release of Harry Smith’s Smithsonian Anthology of American Folk Music), the album is as ruggedly individualistic, as freewheeling and uncontainable as the idealized American spirit itself. The disparate and large personalities that comprise the M Shanghai String Band pull it in numerous directions at once, but the resulting heterophony, far from a disorganized jumble, is a glorious testament to the diversity of indigenous experience on offer in this beautiful land. From the air, or the ground, or even under the riverbed – all perspectives explored on this one disk – the American experience emerges as one to be cherished and lamented, but most of all, to be sung.