Michael Rank. Red Hand. Louds Hymn Records

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A Blabber’n’Smoke favourite, Michael Rank continues his unfettered exploration into the hinterlands of bare boned  Americana on Red Hand, his sixth album in four years. Over the course of these albums his husk of a voice has drifted over music that has Appalachian roots but also recalls a grizzled alt country sound that goes back to The Band and The Stones’ occasional forays into country music while elements of The Grateful Dead, Neil Young and The Jacobites have been woven into the thread at times. The slow drizzle of guitars, plaintive fiddle and tentative mandolin with occasional licks of pedal steel that have characterised his latter work have also included an increasing use of a female vocal foil with Emily Frantz and Skylar Gudasz previously featured. His last album Horsehair found him singing with Heather McEntire (of Mount Moriah) and she returns here singing on all of the songs, the pair of them a wonderfully fractured duo, an alternative George and Tammy if you will.

In his press interviews for Red Hand Rank has spoken of his introduction to music back in the seventies and his liking of “soft rock” troubadours such as Cat Stevens, the PR blurb saying it’s like “70’s radio filtered through a Civil War fiddle.” However there’s no Moonshadow type meanderings here as Rank continues to dig into the sinews of deep dark and weird Americana, a perfect embodiment of what Greil Marcus was hinting at when he described The Basement Tapes as “palavers with a community of ghosts.” Rank and McEntire sing like a pair of revenants, wraiths gathered around a microphone whispering their covenants, the band wrapped around them like a Kudzu plant.

That Civil War fiddle opens and closes the first song River Road, a plaintive intro to a gutsy song that does indeed recall the more muscular Cat Stevens of Can’t Keep It In as Rank’s usual skeletal backing is adorned by the Wurlitzer playing of James Wallace adding a bit of oomph. There’s more of that oomph on the horn backed 1964, a swampy ooze of a song but the following Jacob, a magnificent swoon of a song with creamy pedal steel stamps Rank’s standing as a major player. It’s a perfect song suffused with emotion, the vocals stained with an authenticity that beggar’s belief as they strain to connect generations. There’s a heartbreak woven into the fabric of the album with Milkweed a dreamlike recollection of carnal love lost set to a mournful, almost Celtic, lament while The Lord He Take Away is a powerful and intricate assemblage of sawed fiddle and plaintive pedal steel supporting a tale that could be straight from the likes of Cold Mountain. Forever And A Day is a devastating love song as Rank and McEntire sing in unison of their hopes for a wedding day but the music and their delivery seems to suggest that it’s a forlorn hope. Again this song just weeps with emotion, Rank a puppet master of emotive string pulling  delivering slivers of painful beauty.

Red Hand confirms Blabber’n’Smoke’s belief that Michael Rank is an artist of the first degree. Six albums in with all of them somewhat magnificent he deserves to be heard far and wide. Currently he doesn’t travel out with North Carolina but videos of his performances locally show that he can carry off his superb concoction of stained and strained melancholic country laments with ease. Have a listen and then buy the albums, you won’t regret it.

And here’s an older piece from Rank, one that we think shows off his particular talent.

 

Michael Rank & Stag. Mermaids.

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Mermaids makes it three in a row of masterful wracked and raw country folk and rock from North Carolina’s Michael Rank. In the past two years he’s released the guitar splattered double album Kin and the more restrained and desolate In The Weeds . Mermaids completes this triumvirate and carries on from where In The Weeds left off with Rank accompanied by Emily Frantz and many of the same musicians who graced Weeds with what is a bona fide tortured country classic. High praise indeed but over the course of four discs Rank has proved that he and his compadres have the ability to conjure up a twisted, wrecked and broken world peopled by heartbroken folk, drifters and losers who are offered a sense of grace and dignity through Rank’s wonderful drawl.
Mermaids features 11 songs that stagger wonderfully with excellent musicianship that is able to seemingly teeter on the brink of collapse echoing the lyrical despair in the words. It’s a fragile beauty with John Teer’s fiddle, Alex Inglehort’s guitar and Nathan Golub’s pedal steel all part of the glue that sticks it together and over the course of the album they coalesce until the sound flows like molasses, slow, hesitant, finding a course and dripping little by little. The end result is an almost narcotic trawl through stark country meanderings, a blissed out band of despair. Imagine if you will Keef leaving the Stones in ’69 and joining The Band and recording with Neil Young frying honeyslides in the kitchen…………well, OK, it’s not that good but at Blabber’n’Smoke we’re in love with all three of Rank’s releases.
Rank, Frantz and a tin can guitar waltz wearily through the opening Stray as a star crossed couple who return throughout the album trading love lines, sometimes together, sometimes estranged. Shot of Gold opens with “Well I hear you got a man, well I guess he holds your hand, like I wanna,” as the band evoke a very laid back Stray Gator sound with the pedal steel fat and sinuous while a mandolin strums away. Bound To Me is another duet, a tender and affectionate love song with Frantz stealing the show and some very evocative fiddle from Teer. They top this however with their next duet on Totem, a heartache in words and music which pulls at the heartstrings as Teer again adds his plaintive fiddle and the band pluck tenderly around the words. Sublime is a good enough word to describe Totem and Rank and his buddies come close to matching this on all of the songs here. A few move into a faster pace such as Coming Hard which is a spritely hillbilly romp with muscular guitar and mandolin while Teer gives his fiddle a raspy country sound but it’s the still, deep waters of the slow moving songs that draw one in. Words of The Pilot, Devil I Know, Skin and the title song all deserve a paragraph of their own but by now you’ll either want to hear the album or have switched off. You can listen to and buy the album from Rank’s Bandcamp page and if you have ears and something in between you’ll surely pony up and maybe someday he’ll pay us a visit in the UK. There’s an interview with Rank discussing the album here

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Michael Rank and Stag. Kin

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North Carolina musician Michael Rank has been knocking about for the past 20 years with his band Snatches of Pink, a band much in thrall to the likes of Nikki Sudden, Johnny thunders and Keith Richards. This solo effort sees him backed by members of the band along with several other North Carolina luminaries from bands such as Trailer Bride, Patty Hurst Shifter and Chatham County Line. It’s been five years since he’s recorded and in that time he fathered a son only to have his partner leave him and some of this is reflected here, which might bode well for those who see “break up” albums as a surefire way to call up the muse.
Describing his new outfit as “the illegitimate son of rock and roll casualties Snatches of Pink” Rank also calls them the “acoustic arm of the scarecrow,” presumably to differentiate this line up from the gutter glitter image and sound of the earlier band and while its true that fiddles fly and acoustic guitar predominates there’s plenty of electric bursts and buzzes that spark and burn on what is a set of wonderfully ramshackle country leaning rock songs.
The opening country thrash of Tenderhook doesn’t really prepare the listener for the majesty of On The Bleed, a ballad straight from the Stones’ country songbook with keening pedal steel and curling guitars winding in and around Rank’s strained and wearied vocals, tremendous stuff. The Goat is another Stones like cut with some stately piano playing adding a degree of faded grandeur to it. The country honk of Straw Man starts off as a fine fiddle and mandolin laced stomp, a hillbilly Son Volt almost but towards the end Rank launches into an audacious ragged glory of a guitar solo that tears the song to shreds and leaves the listener beaten into submission. Underneath the angst and chaos Rank does write some beautiful songs here with Tongue, another song in the late sixties Stones decadent style standing out while Arrowheads is a heartfelt plea regarding his failed relationship. His guitar work at times ranks with Neil Young for angry and massive slices of noise such as when he lets rip towards the end of Manservant.
This is not an album for anyone who wants to hear polished and tidy country rock. Several of the songs are almost like a visceral assault on the ears, Gun Breaths has Stag’s pained voice howling over swathes of guitar and piano while the closer Here Comes The Light ramps this up to the nth degree. Some of the lyrics are close to the bone as Rank examines what went wrong but overall it’s a brave and naked attempt to wrest some sense from his life. To his and the musicians’ credit they deliver in spades with what is one of the most invigorating albums we’ve heard this year.

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On The Bleed