Awooo

Ruen Brothers strip their sound down to its twangy, haunted core on 2025s Awooo. The duos fourth album and first since moving from their native England to their adopted home of Louisville, Kentucky, Awooo finds the brothers (singer, guitarist Henry Stansall and guitarist, multi-instrumentalist Rupert Stansall) pared down to their essentials. Consequently, the album shares little with its predecessor, 2023s Ten Paces. Where that album found them blending their vintage 50s- and 60s-inspired rock with hooky pop elements, Awooo is all spare folk and country; a shadowy evocation of the long winter in which it was recorded. What connects all the duos work is a sharp self-awareness and wry, post-modern sense of humor. Its an arch sensibility that pops up in the albums title. "Awooo" is an onomatopoeia, an evocation of a lonely wolfs cry; one they literally sing in "Sitting at the Station" where it works as a bit of theatrical mood-setting for an album that often feels like a dream of the old west. Or, more accurately, a dream of an imagined old west -- David Bowie in tall glitter-laden cowboy hat riding into town in a 50s black & white TV show western. Much of this is due to Henry Stansalls reedy delivery, which owes as much to the flat croon of Joy Divisions Ian Curtis as it does rockabilly-adjacent legends like Roy Orbison. Cuts like "Can You Face the Water?," "Desert Showers," and "The Cabin on the Hill" are both starkly atmospheric and rootsy, a heretofore unimagined bridge between traditional folk and post-punk. Equally inspired is their reworking of the traditional tune "Mama Dont Allow" and the closing "Seeing Ghosts," the latter of which nicely encapsulates the metaphysical themes at play on the album. They sing, youre "seeing ghosts if youre seeing me"; cue the "awooo" of a far-off wolf. ~ Matt Collar