If the term Country Goth evokes for you a hayseed Robert Smith dressed in black broadcloth & carrying a banjo & a bible while riding the circuit on a flop eared mule through the backcountry of the Arkansas Territory – well, you might be on to something.
Sometimes reversed to Gothic Country or narrowed to the awkward but accurate Deathgrass & often enough thrown into the overstuffed grab bag of Americana, this is a style of music that is surprisingly flexible enough to encompass raucous barndance hoedowns & lonesome axe murderers morosely plinking away on a dulcimer deep in the Dark Forest of the Doomed.
Heck, Colorado practically invented one of the major strands of this kind of music with the pioneering Slim Cessna’s Auto Club breaking ground for Munly and the Lupercalians, 16 Horsepower, Wovenhand & The Denver Gentlemen. All these are incestuous intertextual arrangements of performers who tend to dip their ladles into a boiling pot of shared themes and obsessions: hard luck & high wind, cold beer & hot blood, unfaithful hearts & implacable revenge – the Lord’s Lightening & the Sinner’s Remorse. Songs full of moonchop, broken teeth, black roses & hawk talons. Songs about those days, & there are many, when what’s given with one hand is taken away, with interest, by the other.
All of which is a roundabout way of recommending a very fine entry to the above category: Tensas: Let The River Speak (Tall Tale Records)
Tensas (one guy? more?) is a transplant from Louisiana who now makes his home somewhere in the Colorado Springs area.
Favoring simple, lean arrangements as quick & clean as a knife between the ribs, song lyrics of bitter loss and hollow victory, the ten tracks on the album are delivered in a dry, laconic, deadpan voice: fatal & fatalistic at the same time.
The album delivers on its promise that it is ‘the funeral procession you didn’t know you needed.’
Join me and the rest of the mourners & give it a listen.
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I’m getting a Stan Ridgeway vibe. Not bad at all!
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