Album Review: Falling Faster Than You Can Run by Nathaniel Rateliff

Nathaniel Rateliff has a voice that has been lived in. Not the wracked pantomime of a Tom Waits–showground-backwoods-hobo, but a voice that has nonetheless been weathered, battered; whose owner has stayed up too late doing too many fun things. It is with warmth and oak-aged mellowness that his rusty pipes tackle this collection of bruised acoustic songs.

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There's a lonely whippoorwill feel to Nathaniel Rateliff's second album, as though he wrote it all in a woodland clearing near the log cabin home of Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago. What he can see in his peripheral vision, however, is Mumford & Sons, stomping and a-hollering around a campfire. Rateliff's songs shuttle in mood from the one to the other: Still Trying and How to Win are soft, sorrowful things, his voice crying out in the emptiness, "I don't know a goddamn thing." Don't Get Too Close and Nothing to Show For are raucous and impassioned, his voice nasal over stabbing chords and pummelling drums.

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Well, it doesn’t take long for Falling Faster Than You Can Run to reveal that Nathaniel Rateliff isn’t in a very good place. His deep funk is revealed very quickly on the opening track ‘Still Trying‘: “If you roll in it long enough/your shit won’t even smell” sings Rateliff, in between crying out, unaccompanied, “I don’t know/I don’t know/a god damned thing”. And that’s the feeling that sticks throughout this, often very fine, new record from Denver, Colorado’s Missouri-born Rateliff.

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