Mamer

The clue to the heart of Eagle lies on its album cover: you see western China's wide-open plains and an azure sky, bisected by powerlines stretched to their limit across that lonely landscape. The message transmitting across the distance? It's Mamer's sternum-penetrating baritone, born in the sticks and honed in China's cities on a diet that includes both Television and Huun-Huur-Tu. This is Chinagrass, an Alt Country/Tuvan-Kazakh hybrid that Mamer has pioneered, which is at once stunningly familiar and enticingly strange -- think Leonard Cohen transplanted to China's outback.