Reviews

but still disciplined strumming and picking of Butler’s banjo and Beck’s mandolin. The two are seemingly dueling at the same time as completing the quartet’s chug-rhythm foundation.

The full-fledged, hyperactive picking aspect of their technique takes off in the song’s bridges, of course, where the energy peaks. In Warbler country, it’s that skillful yet loose mandolin and banjo that hold up Dalton’s crisp vocals with these backing hooligans hollerin’ harmony.

Remaining covers on Small Town Songs honor John Prine’s “Grandpa Was a Carpenter,” Dr. Mac Rebennack’s (AKA Dr. John)

The Tennessee Warblers

Small Town Songs

Nashville bluegrass quartet The Tennessee Warblers finally released a pre-pandemic project from October 2018 that was “to be the Tennessee Warblers’ debut record of the year 2019” but, as halted by events of the last three years, it’s absolutely 2022’s debut record of the year for Valentine’s Day 2023. And, whether covering as bluegrass preservationists or venturing away from such standard practice with band originals, the 12 tracks on The Tennessee Warblers’ Small Town Songs follow that old, well-known tradition of young men’s drive to woo the women.

To preface, we’ve got the core of the band, co-writers John Beck (vocals, mandolin, fiddle) and Adam Dalton (vocals, guitar) writing The Tennessee Warblers’ first original, “Restless,” before picking up Dean Marold (upright bass) and Charles Butler (banjo, Dobro) to round out a minimally, but properly equipped bluegrass quartet that took up residency at the Sutler Saloon in Nashville four years ago. After finetuning the lineup and set-list-become-track-list, the quartet recorded in ideal ambience in the hallway of a Madison, Tennessee shotgun cabin in October 2018. Small Town Songs technically became a Nathan Yarborough/Leo Roriz mobile production, then, within that cabin overlooking the Cumberland River.

The Warblers kick off Small Town Songs with a Valentine-appropriate tune (previously recorded by George Jones and Roger Miller) “Nothing Can Stop Me Loving You,” featuring a midtempo chug provided by the acoustic guitar and walking upright bass, reinforced by the looser,

“Such a Night,” The Faces’ “Ooh La La” and Los Lobos’ “Evangeline” (which finds Butler switching to Dobro). The bluegrass staple “Moonshiner” stylistically flexes The Tennessee Warblers’ less disciplined, non-traditional “picked/strummed” combo style again, hazily invoking The Infamous Stringdusters covering Pink Floyd’s airy, pre-Dark Side of the Moon track “Fearless” (it gets jammy). A solid version of Grateful Dead’s “Valerie” finishes the album.

Warbler originals throughout Small Town Songs include “Elliot’s Ice” (surely inspired by Kevin Hayes of Old Crow Medicine Show), a main squeeze’s homage in “Mandy,” the band’s ballad “Restless” and the Daltonpenned “Lament De Superman” and “She Don’t Mind.” They ain’t exactly subtle, ladies. The whole album is somewhat sexually suggestive to a bluegrass degree, but socially acceptable and classy enough to be public. Musically, the Warblers flit between being loose and disciplined, difficult to do and remain bluegrass. That magic happens when knowing what to do is already muscle memory.

Small Town Songs can be found on Spotify, Pandora, iHeart, Amazon, Apple and Linktree, and through tnwarblers.com; the Tennessee Warblers’ gold mine, though, is found on their YouTube channel. —

BRYCE HARMON

Everything Everywhere All at Once

DIRECTORS Daniels

STARRING Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, James Hong RATED R

Yes, Everything Everywhere All at Once (Everything from here on) came out roughly eight months ago, but it’s Oscar season and this absolutely bonkers but beautiful film was rightfully nominated for 11 awards (the most of any film this year) including Best Picture and Best Directing.

If you haven’t seen it yet (as I had not) and have any interest at all, there’s no easier time to watch Everything. The film begins at a kinetic pace—and rarely lets up —at the home of the Wang family, where Evelyn is trying to get her taxes together while also planning for a lunar New Year’s party in the family laundromat one floor below. Her husband Waymond (Quan) is trying to help out while also trying to find the right time to hand Evelyn divorce papers. Their daughter Joy (Hsu) is reluctantly joining them with her girlfriend Becky, whom Evelyn willfully refers to as “Joy’s friend,” especially in front of her ailing 90-year-old father Gong Gong (Hong).

This frenetic family dynamic serves as the jumping pad for a Matrix-esque multidimensional action comedy-drama, when Evelyn is abruptly called upon mid-audit to save the universes, all of them. All of a sudden her meek husband is a nononsense super spy giving Evelyn orders while the stern auditor Deirdre (Jamie Lee

Curtis) becomes a pipe-wielding maniac.

The wild and unexpected turns that Everything takes only require a few moments of orientation before the superb direction and deft editing make something as strange and off-putting as a “literal everything bagel” and a “hot-dog finger universe” seem as natural and inevitable as rain.

This is the same directing duo (Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, aka Daniels) that made the Daniel Radcliffe and Paul Dano farting-corpse movie Swiss Army Man (so many Dans). Many trusted sources urged me to watch that movie, calling it “very funny” and “surprisingly sweet.” I still haven’t watched it, but after seeing Everything, I realize that my biggest fear of the Daniels was that they were not only gross and weird, but cynical.

If Everything Everywhere All at Once is any indication, they are anything but cynical. Yes, Everything can be gross, and yes, it is definitely very weird—a compliment in my book—but it is also a very sincere and heartfelt film.

Yeoh and Quan are absolutely phenomenal. Seeing Ke Huy Quan (The Goonies, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) acting again after such a long hiatus, and in his best role ever (I don’t say that lightly), is nothing short of awe-inspiring.

Somehow, a weirdo directing duo wrapped a simple story of a ChineseAmerican family’s intergenerational trauma in a package of Michel Gondry meets Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and made it a universal experience, and a tearfully delightful one at that. I only docked it half a star for one too many hot-dog finger scenes; they really shove ’em down your throat.

— JAY SPIGHT