A Review of Kevin Farge’s Epic New Release: 27-TRACK ALBUM ‘COUNTRY LOVE SONG’
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Right, so: twenty-seven tracks, recorded in a Costa Rican jungle cabin surrounded by mango trees above a surf break, by an artist raised between American and Costa Rican worlds who spent six years in his mother’s village getting around by bicycle and making music in a home studio that smells like ocean air and afternoon rain.
If that setup sounds too good to be true, prepare to be corrected, because Country Love Song is the real thing: a genuinely sprawling, warm, funny, gorgeous and genre-fluid record that earns every one of its twenty-seven tracks and then some.
Kevin Farge moves between folk, Texas slowcore, Brazilian jazz, orchestral indie pop, alt-country, American Primitive guitar and Costa Rican marimba tradition with the ease of someone who absorbed all of these things as lived experience rather than aesthetic choices. ‘Good Girls’ collides country storytelling with Latin rhythms and indie-rock energy. ‘Two Bags of Rice’ burns with restless baião rhythm alongside Gregory Rogove, Devendra Banhart’s longtime collaborator. ‘Memphis’ with Little Wings is as warm and tender as alt-country gets. ‘Never Gonna Back Down’ builds strings and breakbeats and detuned guitar into something that feels genuinely anthemic without trying to.
The quieter moments hit just as hard: ‘Mariel Pt. 2’ as a meditative seaside reflection, ‘Pastoral’ evoking the entire lineage of Portuguese guitar through a Costa Rican lens. And throughout it all, Farge’s voice: unguarded, intimate and completely in command of the emotional territory it moves through.
“I grew up between worlds,” he says. “This album is what it sounds like when those worlds stop arguing and start singing together.” Consider us thoroughly convinced.
