You know you’re in the presence of true blues music – pained expressions from life’s emotional gutter, the rough end of life filtered through minor chords and a tarred larynx – when you feel the poison taking hold with each slow passing second. If that doesn’t do the trick it might consider putting your head through the bar window when it’s done. And if that doesn’t work you’ll doubtless be under the influence anyway, doling out the same to the first person you see. Indiana’s desperately dramatic Murder By Death, three albums old at home but taking a first swing at the UK this week, are a thrillingly gloomy band, impregnated by bourbon and bad dreams. Frontman Adam Turla tells us such tonight, introducing song after song about or inspired by whiskey. It even makes an appearance in anecdotes about that afternoon’s tourist trail visit to the Tower of London. It’s the kind of behaviour that can only eventually leave a stain. They’re not a blues band in absolute terms, not in the traditional sense, they’re really far more complex and haunting than that, but they retain some of its ambience and heavy aftertaste. On record it’s all much closer to Godspeed or Bad Seeds style uneasy instrumentation. But here, in close quarters, in blues’ spiritual home environment, the neon advertisements of the bar but a stretched arm away, things feel hoarse, ragged and relatively uncomplicated. Turla’s voice, a furnace of toiled conviction, only amplifies this impression. They remind a little of a slowed Jonathan Fire*Eater (The Walkmen before they were The Walkmen) in this context, especially with the sharp, flexible percussion of Alex Scrodt creating a relatively snappy momentum. They’re clearly a rabble of misfits, a one off assortment, which can only help their dark cause. Adam Turla is a slight dandy, waistcoated and booted, a gravely character, a host. Bassist Mat Armstrong is a looming hulk, with bouncer tattoos eyeing you up, menacing in black. And Scrodt is an impossible length and elastic in nature, looking like he had to be tied in a knot just to sit him down on his drum stool. But their secret weapon is terse cellist Sarah Balliet. Looking as delicate as a pristine china doll in herself, she carves up distorted onslaughts like an arpeggio assassin with a frantic, angular, Soviet discipline, and wraps up slower moments in dense Kashmir melody. She drives a fairly clear-cut proposition towards more myriad realms. We got out with bruises alone tonight. Next time we might not be so lucky. Relevant sites:
http://www.murderbydeath.com/
James Berry for Crud Magazine 2006© |
