The Everybodyfields

Call it down-home or downcast; the Everybodyfields' restless recasting of neo-Appalachian folk tradition is nothing if not emotive. The title of their third album, Nothing Is Okay, may suggest a certain pessimistic perspective, and while cochairs Sam Quinn and Jill Andrews tend to skew their sound toward more melancholic musings, they also craft songs that are both heavenly and heartbreaking. With acoustic guitars, pedal steel, and fiddles providing a supple cushion for their aching, wistful vocals, Quinn and Andrews trade off leads, a sort of emotional yin and yang that gives a he/she perspective to tales of broken bonds and quiet desperation. "Tuesday" emerges among the best of the bunch; when Andrews coos "Hey, it's me, I know it's 3 a.m./Saying please pick up the phone," anyone's who's ever been on either end of a shattered relationship will empathize with that feeling of abject desperation. It's hardly the sort of stuff you want to crank up the next time the gang's over for fun and games. But the next morning, when you're shaking off a hangover and wondering what you could have said to keep your lover from insisting it's over, the Everybodyfields might just give you some kind of solace in knowing you're not the only one basking in such sorrows.