The Albertans, though, are not about place or pedigree. It is passage, the extremis of transmitting real bodies across the tangled wires and abstracted networks of space and person, that comes through when they play. Their songs are a cartography of North America mapped on the trail of human footsteps’ fading heat signatures. It is traveling music, and they sing their songs in search of a road through territory made uncertain by love, dreams, and strange frustrations, the few directions to be heard tuned in dubiously on the last working AM radio. |