The first track on Edges Run, Mipso’s album slated for release in April, is called “Take Your Records Home,” and it chronicles the end of a love affair punctuated with the titular request, a plea to remove the music that now represents something lost and missed. It has the sweet, dusty ache of classic ’70s Folk Rock and the supernatural harmonies of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, but it also shimmers with the heartbreaking potential of what might have been if Gram Parsons had survived his demons and continued on his path with Emmylou Harris. And that’s just the first song.
The group’s seeds were planted in 2011 when University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill students Joseph Terrell and Jacob Sharp began performing as a guitar/mandolin duo in and around their Chapel Hill environs. The group expanded with the addition of bassist Wood Robinson, dubbing the project the Mipso Trio, then signed with a local label to release the debut album, 2012’s Long, Long Gone. Many origin stories have been floated to account for the band’s name, but the one that seems to have stuck is that it’s based on a Japanese phrase that describes something familiar yet slightly off-kilter as being “a little pee in the miso,” and that the group simply added a little “p” to the “miso.”
After their 2013 graduation, the three musicians toured Japan for two weeks, a trip that was captured by indie filmmaker Jon Kasbe in the fittingly titled documentary Mipso in Japan. The band also dropped the “Trio” that same year and released its sophomore album, Dark Holler Pop, featuring more traditional Bluegrass approaches to instrumentation and arranging. In 2014, Mipso became a quartet after securing longtime collaborator Libby Rodenbough as its full-time fiddler and vocalist, and the quartet returned to the studio for 2015’s Old Time Reverie, which found the band delving into new sonic territory with more moody Americana touches (still, the album debuted in the top slot on Billboard’s Bluegrass chart).
Mipso’s Americana evolution continued with the gorgeous melancholy of last year’s Coming Down the Mountain, and it’s cemented with the imminent release of the excellent Edges Run, almost a year to the day later. Certainly there’s nothing particularly new about blending Folk, Gospel and Rock into a dry rub to season a batch of Bluegrass songs with a smoky twang, but Mipso has discovered that rare chemistry of four people coming together and uncorking bottled lightning with every tour and trip to the studio.
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This article appears in Feb 28 – Mar 7, 2018.