Bow Thayer and Perfect Trainwreck’s “Eden” is a collision of hope and destruction in songs that steer clear of pretension and hippie muck. While Thayer’s banjo anchors the tunes, only “Blackstone Valley” smacks of an old-timey sound. The rest of the songs veer off in different directions, from the propulsive roots rock of “The Beauty of All Things” to the brooding heaviness of “Trials.” Thayer, a Bostonian now based in Vermont, surveys humanity’s self-inflicted wounds, particularly environmental blight and war. He draws some crisp images of the maniacal survivors and heartbroken poets roaming a bombed-out paradise. While he gets a little heavy-handed with his fish and bird narrators in “The Tide,
Essential “Parallel Lives”
Bow Thayer plays the Sinclair on March 15.