FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 2000. All Rights Reserved

Music by Martin Kemp Like the album title, the cover artwork on The Cash Brothers’ sophomore release, Phonebooth Tornado, gives a sense of impending doom. Contrasting light and dark colours to illustrate a lone phone booth on a farmer’s barren field as an ominous storm rumbles closer, the picture is both stark and dramatic. Many of the songs on Peter and Andrew Cash’s soon-to-be released album reflect much of the same imagery, except the phone booth becomes more of a personal metaphor for the human condition. Not necessarily in a lone field, but perhaps on a busy street late at night, as taxis and drunks parade by. And of course many of us may be familiar with the post closing-time phone booth experience – calling a friend, a lover or an ex, in desperation, sadness or just boredom. To Andrew Cash, the phone booth metaphor goes a long way to illustrating something we’ve probably all felt at one point or another. The title, Tornado Phonebooth, speaks to the overall alt-country vibe of the record, "which has this underlying theme of inner turmoil, and how that spins out into relationships," explains Andrew from his home in Toronto. "It’s like when you have a significant conversation in a phone booth – there’s something about that image that talks about a certain kind of desperation, which we try to pick at a little bit on this record." "The whole thing about the phone booth is interesting," he adds. "It’s this little cubicle, like a room, but all glass and you don’t have any privacy. But there you are, sometimes spilling your guts out, or whatever you’re doing." It is surprising, with their distinct and haunting lyrics and naturally symbiotic harmonies, that after over a decade of writing and touring separately (Peter with the Skydiggers, Andrew as a solo artist and with his bands Ursula and L’Etranger), it wasn’t until 1999 that the brothers released their first album together, Raceway. "The reason we started playing together was that both of us for the first time in our careers didn’t have anything going on," says Andrew. That was the reason we hadn’t started anything before, because we always had too many things on the go. So Peter had just left the Skydiggers, and Ursula had just split up too. We were both burned out from touring, and both had the time, so we said ‘Shit, man, we should try this now before we get ourselves into something else.’" The Cash Brothers describe their new album as "tight, meltingly delicious harmonies set against a hauntingly spare background of bass, drums and acoustic guitar." It’s a sound, according to Andrew, made possible by the fact that they each come from different musical experiences, and are able to combine those experiences to create something that can be sparse but rich at the same time. With any recording, he says, there’s always a question of how much is enough. "What you’re really trying to do is put just enough on a track, and no more. So in a way that’s what we’ve been trying to do. Peter’s sort of the minimalist recording guy, and I tend to venture a little further afield, so we kind of meet in the middle, and that’s what we like."

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