Where in Our Woods

Elephant Micah features the songs of Joe O’Connell, who at times could be mistaken for Will Oldham, a major influence on his music who guests here as a harmony vocalist. Surely fans of Oldham’s most straightforward acoustic folk will feel at home with *Where in Our Woods*, a sparse but sublime album that’s as much about the space between notes as the notes themselves. Joe’s brother Matthew O’Connell plays a stripped-down drumset on “Demise of the Bible Birds” to accompany the nylon string guitar and antique pump organ, but “Slow Times Vultures” and “Monarch Gardeners” create auras ever more quietly.

Elephant Micah is Joseph O’Connell, a singer-songwriter whose songs betray his day job as an Indiana folklorist. He’s been experimenting with Americana for 14 years now, and his new album, featuring vocals from Will Oldham, strips away all but guitar, voice, a pump organ, and some rumbling drums.

Folk music over the years has come to mean something at once specific and indefinable. On the one hand, it's an umbrella term for indigenous musical traditions from around the world, from the deserts of northern Africa to the thin air of the Andes to the hollers of Appalachia, and many more places besides.

Do not attempt to hide from the cacophony of modern city life in Indiana songwriter and folklorist Joe O'Connell's (aka Elephant Micah) Wher...