Gibson & Toutant: On the Green | Sleepy Cat Records Mar. 22
As the world turns in an increasingly digital direction, the ragged edges of existence get sanded down. The algorithmic engines humming in our pockets steer us away from strange serendipity. What we see, hear, and consume becomes more and more familiar. Traces of the old weird America fade from view.
But Durham duo Gibson & Toutant construct an eccentric world of sonic peculiarity on debut full-length On the Green, out March 22 on Sleepy Cat Records. Digital static grafts onto toy piano melodies. Guitar riffs crackle as if hot-wired through coaxial cables. Banjo and bass blend with bleary dial tones. Fiddle licks fuse with found sounds. Stutter-step drums sync up with manipulated samples.
Call it postmodern roots music—a uniquely North Carolina tincture that, according to the band’s bio, “couldn’t exist without digital technology, but which beats with an analog heart.” Married couple Josephine McRobbie and Joseph O’Connell share that heart, blending two decades of experience in psychedelic rock, outsider folk, ethnomusicology, and internet archives into a sneaky statement of excellence.
Liner notes for On the Green frame it in the heady context of “interpersonal telekinesis” and “emotional proximity.” McRobbie and O’Connell trace the project’s roots to their 2018 honeymoon in Australia (McRobbie’s home before moving to the United States at age 12). Traveling through Brisbane and Mooloolah Valley, the duo recorded melodic experiments on an old GEM Rodeo synth organ while celebrating the spirit of McRobbie’s late uncle Vern, a prolific rockabilly musician and handmade instrument builder.
Back in the Triangle, McRobbie and O’Connell culled their library of Down Under fragments into two four-song EPs, which they released as Gibson & Toutant—an ode to their mothers’ maiden names—featuring song titles culled from Uncle Vern’s lyrics. Meandering through a dusty soundscape cheekily dubbed “American Australiana,” the self-produced sets combine tinkling drum loops, surreal audio snippets, fiddle from McRobbie’s stepsister Carol Catherine, and synth from O’Connell’s brother Matt.
On the Green extends those early experiments into confident new directions. Gibson & Toutant gave themselves three days to write the album, playing a sonic game of telephone by assigning each other song parts. They lobbed chord progressions and offhand phrases back and forth while trading off parenting time with their toddler, now three years old.
“We didn’t have a plan when we started,” O’Connell tells the INDY over coffee at Durham Co-Op Market on a rainy February morning. “It really did unfold based on happenstance.”
Yet the duo trusted the process—especially since it was a natural fit for their daily cadence.
“Even devoting three days to writing was no small feat with a younger child,” McRobbie says. “But it led to a better product. We both enjoy working with some kind of constraints.”
They extended those limitations to On the Green’s recording process: three days spent with Wye Oak’s Andy Stack in his Doom Homestead studio.
“Letting Andy in on the project gave us a lot of confidence that the music was viable,” McRobbie says. “He was enjoying the same jokes as us while helping us figure out how to best utilize our sound.”
Their mutual success blossoms on the jagged album-opening collage “Carolina Shred.” McRobbie murmured the melodic phrase to her daughter while nursing—“that beautiful, intimate time that’s also an endless expanse,” she laughs. O’Connell embellished it with vintage telephone beeps. Kaleidoscopic and befuddling, the creative experience of “Carolina Shred” was liberating, says O’Connell, who’s performed as Elephant Micah for nearly 25 years. “With an editor like Josephine at my side, I was willing to try stuff really fast—stuff that I wouldn’t try if I was just working solo.”
McRobbie’s roots in surf-rock and post-punk with bands Thee Tsunamis and Tammar permeate “Quoth My Baby,” a jangly earworm that serves as the album’s lead single. Veering between turbulence and tenderness, it underscores the artistic dialogue of Gibson & Toutant—two lifelong artists inhabiting an intimate, fragmented musical world while asking themselves, Should I wait for my partner’s next transmission or elbow my way into the conversation?
Referencing a recent songwriting class taught by Phil Elverum of Mt. Eerie that she attended, McRobbie says, “One of the things that stuck with me is to attempt to write in the plainest way possible, without trying to sound smart or poetic. Even if it’s a more vulnerable process, there’s some truth that will resonate with others.”
The phrase “quoth my baby” came to her on a pregnant pandemic stroll as she imagined “a dual protagonist that was not my kid but an adult who was headstrong and hard to pin down. Playing with a character in that roundabout way was fun.”
Further character studies abound on “Norm’s Oranges” and “Vicky’s Chimes,” two noir-ish songs that blend cowboy goth, twee pop, and leering voyeurism. “The Click” is more autobiographical, settling into an easygoing groove as McRobbie “ride[s] on my bike” and “stop[s] at the tollbooth” under a “coral-colored dusk.” Originally built atop a reversed sample from ’80s jam “She Drives Me Crazy” by Fine Young Cannibals, Stack coaxed the duo’s demo version into full bloom with frenetic guitar licks from Jake Xerxes Fussell and fine-grained fiddle from Libby Rodenbough.
On the Green’s esoteric sonic markers range farther afield: The Raincoats, Yo La Tengo, Young Marble Giants, and Aldous Harding. “Little Rider” finds percussive inspiration in Primitive Radio Gods and Ani DiFranco, O’Connell swears—though his brother Matt transposed the preprogrammed beats to live drums.
Such playfulness grounds On the Green in silly, offbeat eclecticism, not snobbish pretension. McRobbie describes the album title as “a little mysterious, archaic-sounding, and open to interpretation”—and also a nod to the cover art and concept behind The KLF’s Chill Out.
The ultimate goal with Gibson & Toutant, she emphasizes, “has always been to amuse each other. Joe likes to make himself chuckle. I want to make myself giggle.”
Case in point: asked about other guest musicians like locals Joseph DeCosimo, Nathan Golub, and Nathan Bowles contributing to the album, McRobbie slyly calls them a “cinematic universe” enlisted to “actively resist Gibson & Toutant being a couples band.” But O’Connell says they also preserved a simulacrum of spontaneity to match On the Green’s creative principles. By the end of the recording process, he says, “it felt like there was a permeable boundary of what the band is.”
That sense of coincidence saturates album closer “The Fairway.” Tinny synthesizers mix with spaghetti Western guitar lines and auditory Easter eggs featuring golf-themed snippets and nine-iron puns, leaving listeners befuddled and intrigued (especially since O’Connell met INDY Week at Hillandale Golf Course for a 2021 interview).
“Oftentimes, I’ll have a dream for what things can be,” O’Connell says, “and part of my dream for On the Green was to produce it like radio theater—a narrative production in terms of how the sound was overlaid.” Laughing, he adds, “We gestured in that direction in a few spots but probably only made it 10 percent of the way toward that dream.” McRobbie extends and mixes the metaphor: “We ran out of steam. We did the relay race and then passed the baton to … no one.”
Recalling how his computer overheated as they finished “The Fairway,” O’Connell sums up On the Green’s spirit with a deadpan punch line: “Technology was failing, daycare-borne illnesses were circulating …. But even if we only got five meters into the race, that’s pretty good. It was a big leap for us to even do this record, period.”
Comment on this story at [email protected].
You must be logged in to post a comment.