About five years back, I chanced upon a small article in my hometown newspaper's "Living" section about a local independent record company called Keyhole Records that, as its opening act, had released a sampler featuring local artists and ones from abroad. The now well-known Spanish band Migala was among them. I was thrilled to discover that there were people in my culturally hopeless city that were producing interesting independent music, rather than just bonehead punk rock and degenerate metal.

I found the compilation, Songs from the Attic, at the library and checked it out. Tinsel's contribution to that record still stands as one of the most starkly depressing songs I've ever heard. Over a sparse guitar pattern, frontman Michael Hopkins repeatedly sung, "We sing from mouths that have no teeth." I felt like shit for hours afterward, and I assume, based on their recorded output, that Tinsel would take this as a compliment.

The Lead Shoes is co-released by Mats Gustafsson's Broken Face label, so it looks like they've hit the big time, at least as far as indie cred is concerned. But Tinsel's music is still as bleak as it was in 1996, if not more so. I once read an interview with Michael Hopkins in which he stated that he preferred to live in a dead town as inspiration for his music. On The Lead Shoes, this concept is taken to an extreme: it was recorded inside of "an old abandoned stone building in a former lead mining town." The result is a collage of fractured folk and dilapidated machinery. It's a document of vacated old-industry towns where few non-residents care to venture, despite realizing that these places are an integral part of our nation's identity. And like other great illustrations of Americana, from the delta blues to Slint's Spiderland, The Lead Shoes couldn't have been made elsewhere.

This record sees Tinsel expanding the scope and palette of their apocalyptic folk. The songs are expansive, and incorporate samples more often than guitar. Rather than plucked melodies, rusty sewing machines and detuned violins comprise the backdrop of Hopkins' disaffected Cohen-esque vocal delivery. Songs range from the love story of "Rebecca," which couples a spare guitar arrangement with "deeply blue annoyance" (to paraphrase David Grubbs), to ramshackle machine ragas like "Eva's Window." But regardless of musical variety, a sense of isolation and deprivation permeates every molecule of the album.

All or most of the sampling and manipulation on The Lead Shoes is done with tape and other basic sonic devices. The unpredictable quality of analog audio and the low fidelity complement each other perfectly. It's conceptually harmonious as well, the idea of getting one's hands dirty cutting tape rather than sitting in an office chair behind a computer being much more conversant with the workmanlike condition of The Lead Shoes.

Perhaps the forward written by Mats Gustafsson puts it best: "Tinsel has formulated the musical equivalent of this dark deserted town. Old signs hang loosely from their creaky hinges. Most of the windows have been smashed out, and the wind seems to blow more harshly than normal. That this ugly reality and the withering honesty hangs in the air like distant echoes... through all of the records 51 minutes of droning melancholia is nothing less than stunning." I wouldn't be so hyperbolic as to call it stunning, but The Lead Shoes is certainly an honest, gritty depiction of the sadness of isolation and dissolution.

-Michael Wartenbe