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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.

In 2003 Matt Schickele quietly home released the CD April November and then retired from music. He got a job in the solar energy field, closed up his guitar case, and slipped into oblivion. April November failed to elicit interest from even the minor-est of labels (after Schickele’s previous efforts had been picked up by Feldspar and Southern Records), so he home pressed the disk…if you asked him to. This narrative – played out ten thousand times across the globe in the shadow of the callous Industry – would have no special interest if the disk in question were not a work of genius. A fusion of Brian Wilson-inspired production (replete with melodeon, melotron, Theremin, backwards effects, and a host of even stranger sonic treats), some low-fi cred (the second half, “November,” is home recorded), and Schickele’s soulful, now smooth now scratchy voice, the album clearly identifies him as a student of the late sixties. Yet instead of devolving into pastiche (like, say, George Harrison’s “When we was fab,” or the infectious but ultimately monotonous music of the Shins), April November absorbs the lessons of the great studio masterminds of the Love era (Wilson and Martin, of course) and thoroughly digests them into the fluids and enzymes of Schickele’s unmistakable personal style. The ostentatious production is so thoroughly musical that at times it is in itself heartbreaking (listen to the squishing water sounds that eventually drown the song “April” and note the unexpected activation of your tear ducts), and the double tracked vocals, dissonantly tinged cascading harmonies, and meticulously composed and arranged instrumental breaks work in concert to support and even become part of what is unquestionably the album’s strongest suit, its songwriting. Tunes like “Don’t Need a Reason,” “Last Day Night,” and “Weird Luck Charm” (as close to Kurt Weill as Schickele will ever come) from the April half of the album burn themselves into your consciousness and haunt your dreams. Which is why its surprising that in fact, the very best songwriting is saved for the six songs that make up the homemade November. This amalgam of innovation, melody, bold form, and devil-may-care looseness is unlikely to be equaled any time soon by Schickele or anyone else. Even Schickele seems aware of the strength of this material in the context of the album, inserting the charming piano piece “The Moon’s on Fire” as a kind of breather before unloading a final song, “Guided,” that is as secularly spiritual, as uplifting and crushing, as transformational and modest as any song I’ve heard. It is his “Day in the Life” to close out his Sgt. Pepper, the punctuation mark at the end of a recording career, stabbed into posterity as the last aching glimpse of what might have been in the alternate world where all artistry reaps its just rewards and adoring fans of intelligent music are not routinely cast to sea.

This story, it seems, has a happy ending. At least a happy continuation. Schickele’s retirement didn’t stick (a great loss to the world of solar energy, no doubt). He was lured back into action when a group of friends began monthly bluegrass jam sessions at the M Shanghai Bistro and Den in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Slowly, this raucous and unseemly collection of banjo-, mandolin-, guitar-, ukulele-, spoon-, saw-, fiddle- and harmonica-playing misfits emerged as the M Shanghai String Band, and after one self-released CD they were signed to Red Parlor, a newish outfit based in Cold Springs, New York. The new release, From The Air, is now available, and will be reviewed in this space some time soon. Schickele is a part time songwriter for the group, alongside the seemingly more prolific Austin Hughes (formerly of Very Pleasant Neighbor). Most importantly, bit by bit, wedged between the monthly (and now more like weekly) gigs of the string band, Schickele has started playing out again as a solo artist. Now, four years after he checked out with April November, he quietly offers Lion Air, a new album.

Lion Air is a stark, short, introverted work. At 26.5 minutes in length, housed in rather nondescript packaging, and featuring only a single acoustic guitar and voice (no harmonies), the album is on the surface unambitious, and almost hopelessly uncommercial. After a full listen to April November (unquestionably the place for you to start if you are a Schickele virgin) you will find yourself wondering why this man is not world famous. Lion Air is unlikely to take hold of you in such away on first listen, and yet it is no small accomplishment. What this album brings to mind perhaps most of all for me is the naturalistic ideology of the Dogma 95 filmmakers led by Lars von Trier. In 1995 they announced a new doctrine, enumerated in specific rules that eschewed special effects, studio production, props and superficiality and artifice of all stripes. Schickele has always been one to avoid even the slightest vocal reverb, and if he has ever employed the digital pitch correction that is nearly ubiquitous in studio recording nowadays he has covered his tracks exceedingly well. Even still, April November was rich with artifice in the best sense of the word, an unending litany of daring studio effects and Production with a capital P. On Lion Air these dressings have been cast aside and there is no place for Schickele to hide. Every string buzz, every vocal crack is left in tact. Song fades are cut off abruptly, words are occasionally swallowed. It sounds like Matt Schickele in his bedroom, singing his songs for no particular audience, occasionally amusing himself, occasionally wistful, sad, silly, mournful. Every performance reads like a first take, in all its freshness and imperfection. If April November was his Sgt. Pepper, to carry that rather inappropriate comparison just a little further, this is his Plastic Ono Band.

With all the accoutrements gone, it is perhaps more possible to hear what a great guitarist Schickele is here than on any previous recording. On a new Martin steel string (the last several CDs featured predominantly nylon string guitar) Schickele’s playing is as sharp and clear as it’s ever been. He has always avoided empty virtuosity, favoring a carefully arranged, dense and dissonant chordal unfolding to a lightning linear cock solo any day of the week, and here that trend continues. But he plays with such precision on Lion Air, and offers so much intricate counterpoint, so much syncopation, seems so deeply in control of every string of the instrument, that the guitar emerges as at least an equal partner in the production, if not the protagonist. This emergence reaches its logical conclusion in the instrumental “Seems Like It’s Time,” an alternately jazzy and folk-like composition that precedes the album’s final track, “Like Us All.” In “Fear All Gravity,” a song that is right at home on this album although I saw Schickele perform it almost twenty years ago, muted and steadily repeated half-chords in the low register of the guitar are disrupted by cathartic jangling interjections that fully realize the potential of Schickele’s new choice of instrument.

The songwriting, which always seems to be Schickele’s principal concern, is sharp and focused on Lion Air. I’m not sure that the album contains classics akin to “Guided,” “Don’t Need a Reason,” “Sweet Anonimity,” “Changeling,” or “Last Day Night,” but no-one should have to live up to such a standard. Indeed the songs on Lion Air are possibly as good, but not as straightforwardly melodic, not as catchy. This can be a plus, as often, the Schickele songs that are least catchy have the most to offer on repeated listenings. The precedent here is not to be found on the extroverted April November, but instead on its predecessor, Cities Filled With Lights, where the subdued, all-acoustic title track quietly co-existed with sparkling grabbers like “Split the Clouds” and “Enemies like Enemies,” and has nonetheless held up with the best of them. Indeed, Lion Air is a CD filled with songs like “Cities Filled With Lights,” although by and large they tend to be more upbeat (less upbeat would be hard). Schickele of late has assumed something of a wistful, nostalgic tone, never in a cloying way, but even at his happiest he sounds somewhat sad. On the opening track, “Ease on it,” he repeatedly sings “Ease on it, can’t take it all on,” in his mellifluous rasp, an instrument informed by the spirit if not the style of the blues. It is a refrain that summarizes the maturity that has crept into what we can only hope is mid-period Schickele, an accepting posture of one that has learned to harness the fire and frustration of deepest youth. This theme is made explicit in one of the album’s best songs, “At a Party,” which I’ll quote at length:

at a party, really don’t belong
trying to pack it up for home

somehow end up quieting this kid
she’s dropped more than she can lift

ask what’s up, what’s going on in there
said the strangest thing to hear

‘the earth is gone, water went ahead
fire wouldn’t come, and the wind is dead’

smile and shrug, try not to say ‘you’re young’
instead say ‘nice poem.’

I don’t miss youth, the loneliness and shyness
but then sometimes I’m surprised

That song, perhaps the hardest rocker on this all-acoustic collection – with the girl’s strange poem delivered with intensity in Schickele’s burning, crackling tenor – is followed by a charming throwaway, “Can I Have a Girlfriend,” a bouncy children’s song that demonstrates Schickele’s not taking himself at all too seriously these days.

The album’s title comes from the final song, a soulful track on which Schickele integrates a syncopated bass line with an intense repeated note riff on the upper guitar, offering a poetic homage to his departed uncle, David Schickele:

come by and see me promise, I won’t forget
the lion-air surrounding him, the movements that he made
intensity of real living, he had a gift
wide-open gestures, eyes that glowed, and glowing still in death

and like us all he dreams

The bluesiest song – and Schickele is never really particularly bluesy, is “It’s all very lovely.” On it, he establishes a kind of down home ostinato, delivered with balls. But, never content (as frightfully too many are) to build an entire song on a vamp, Schickele moves on to a surprise chorus, punctuated by a new, more dynamic riff in a different key setting the words “don’t be afraid of the night time.” The nighttime here, a time of ghosts, is cast as something wonderful and new, and each time it arrives – the section of the song, that is – I feel I’m hearing it for the first time.

Schickele’s voice on the album is not at its smoothest, and his annunciation, as I’ve noted, is very occasionally garbled. But ultimately these potential flaws do not project as such. The effect, instead, is of an artist laying himself bare, understanding that at the end of the day his limitations are the core of his style. Lion Air is not Schickele’s best CD (if you’ve read this far you know who gets that honor), but it is unquestionably his most honest, and as a result, his most courageous. He has arrived at a place musically where he is content to be nothing other than himself, and to share his private music with a public that, if limited in scope, has simply got to be unparalleled in hunger. That this release goes down as a pin dropping on pavement, lost amidst the endless noisy comings and goings of lesser but more famous men and women, is to be lamented. But such laments can gain no traction in the face of the far happier news that Matt Schickele is making music again, and has released another recording of exceptional quality.