For their first collaboration, 2004's Stranger Blues, two legends of low fidelity, Simon Joyner and Dennis Callaci, lived up to their reputations for rudimentary recording by laying down all of the tracks live, direct to a single track of tape, singing and playing into the same microphone for the entire album. Almost ten years later, the follow-up New Secrets is a lot less scrappy, actually multi-tracked, and even somewhat produced, especially by the standards of these artists. As founder of one of the more long-running independent cassette labels Shrimper, Callaci has helped define the bedroom recording template, working in bands like Refrigerator and Paste. Joyner has worked solo cultivating his own sullen singer/songwriter dirges since the early '90s, amassing an enormous discography of ghostly folk expressions. With New Secrets, the two songwriters match and contrast each other's strengths, trading back and forth song for song as Callaci offers up a low-brow, Dylan-esque indie stomper like "The Frayed End of the Rope" to counter a Joyner bummer track like the depressed cowboy sentiments of "Let's Make History Bleed." Recorded and mixed live by Woods member Jarvis Taveniere, the songs are either open and soft, as on the organ-laced ballad "Tender Came By," or steeped in a rootsy warmth, as on more spirited tracks like "Lost Invitation." However, the talent of both writers is to offer a cracked look at traditional songwriting, so even though much of New Secrets is on the more restrained and downtempo side of things, it never feels like a tepid folk set, but more inspired, urgent, and terrified. The hollow, depressive Americana of "Beat by Beat" captures the unique mood of the album perfectly, as minor-key guitar passages meet foggy noise textures and ghostly backing vocals, finding some creepy alternate world of lost highways, broken homes, and eternal twilights. ~ Fred Thomas, Rovi

1		Mary
2		Old Man In the Rain
3		Guitar as Guitar
4		Let's Make History Bleed
5		The Frayed End of the Rope
6		San Antonio
7		Lost Invitations
8		Beat by Beat
9		Tender Came By
10		Blessed Things
11		There Will be a Time

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