Album Of The Week: Hiss Golden Messenger Lateness Of Dancers

If you've ever lived in a big city and then left for the boonies, a couple of things will never get old. One is the relative novelty of being able to look up and see stars -- not just one or two of them, but a sea of them, entire constellations that you only recognize from books, expanses of glittering sparks that city lights always hid from you. The other is crickets. The first time you go for a walk on summer night and you notice that chirping, it's all you want to hear. There's something nourishing and welcoming about all those bugs rubbing their legs together and trying to fuck each other, and it's a sound you don't realize how much you miss until you return to it. If, however, you live somewhere where you can't hear the crickets, then Lateness Of Dancers, the fifth album that M.C. Taylor has recorded under his Hiss Golden Messenger alias, is happy to bring that sound to you. Lots of people from the Southeastern indie roots-music scene play on Lateness Of Dancers: Steel-string impressionist William Tyler, the Cook brothers from Megafaun, Mountain Man's Alexandra Sauser-Monnig. But the most important guests on the album might be the crickets you can hear chirping throughout the title track. Lateness Of Dancers is, among other things, an album about place, about bringing all your baggage to some comfortable spot and setting it down. And there's nothing quite as settling, as centering, as that cricket sound. (That's unless you listen to Lateness Of Dancers somewhere where you've already got crickets. Then it's: "Oh weird, the crickets just got really loud.")