Son Of The Velvet Rat. Solitary Company. Fluff And Gravy Records

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It’s been a while since we heard from Son Of The Velvet Rat, the intriguingly named duo of Georg Altziebler and Heike Binder, originally from Austria, but ensconced in the Mojave Desert’s Joshua Tree for several years. Their 2017 album Dorado was a fine set of noirish (and beautifully sluggish) songs which transported a European sense of faded grandeur into a gothic American landscape with hints of The Walkabouts and The Handsome Family allied to visions of David Lynch movies.

Solitary Company finds the pair digging deeper into their new American roots while retaining a foothold in the old country. They open with Alicia, a song which recalls Leonard Cohen, both in its arrangement and its lyrics as Altziebler’s wizened voice intones, “I’m the paint brush, not the painter…I am just the singer not the song” – a more Cohen like set of words we’ve yet to hear. The title track follows and immediately we’re in deeper territory as the dense arrangement (including hammered piano, glockenspiel, violin and viola) is hypnotic and bewildering with the band sounding as if they were Calexico suffering from an attack of the bends having dived too deep. Calexico come to mind again on the whistled intro to Stardust but, as the band rattle on, it’s more the dry and dusty desert rock of the much-missed Thin White Rope which is the template here. Whatever, it’s a full throttled driving rock song and they repeat this later on when the funky beats of Beautiful Disarray heave into view. Borne aloft by some tremendous organ and harmonica interplay, this could be a hit on a hip radio station with its sinuous savvy.

Altzbeiber’s voice is well worn and not a million years away from that of Bob Dylan’s these days and as such it’s difficult not to imagine some of the songs here as being drawn from the same well as Dylan sucked from on Rough And Rowdy Ways, albeit with a fuller musical palette. When The Lights Go Down is a twilight song to delight with lonesome harmonica, slow shuffling beat and guttural guitar grunts, as Altzbeiber creates a wonderful crepuscular world. Remember Me limps along wonderfully with Binder conjuring some amazingly atmospheric sounds from her assorted keyboards while 11 & 9 (the date of Altzbeiber’s and Binder’s wedding) draws also from Dylan although here it’s more akin to his New  Morning period. All in all, Solitary Company deserves a listen from anyone interested in a kaleidoscopic immersion into Americana’s hinterlands.

Son Of The Velvet Rat. Dorado. Fluff & Gravy Records

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dorado

The arrestingly titled Son Of The Velvet Rat are husband and wife duo Georg Altziebler and Heike Binder, both Austrian but now domiciled in Joshua Tree in the Californian desert. Like that other married duo, The Handsome Family, Son Of The Velvet Rat inhabit a somewhat gothic twilight zone, a crepuscular portrait of a sometimes dark and eerie landscape with their muted tones reminiscent of rituals and murky deeds. Producer Joe Henry evokes well the atmosphere in his liner notes which portray a motel, part Bates, part Lynch, all mystery.

The songs slouch forward for the most part with Georg’s voice a haunting half sung threnody (which recalls Chip Taylor’s recent efforts) while the music floats on drifts of organ, accordion and splintered guitar with occasional decoration from pedal steel and violin.  A couple of the songs have a pulse beat beyond moribund with Blood Red Shoes a fine upholstered ride along a dark highway with additional vocals from the much missed Victoria Williams while Surfer Joe is like Springsteen taking time out to hang with some Repo Men with an alien in the trunk of their car. Starlight Motel opens with an evocative Spanish guitar trill and spooky harmonica but gradually picks up speed as the gears shift up with Georg on the run from a mystery crime. Part gangster story, part metaphysics, it glows with an evil neon malice, guitars shimmering in the reflection.

The meat of the album is in the slow procession of darkness exemplified by the opening Carry On, a funereal number with weeping violin. Copper Hill is suffused with mournful horns as the song slowly advances again like a funeral but here with a New Orleans like dignity. Love’s The Devil’s Foe rests upon a plaintive organ note before an impassioned plea from Georg to his succubus has the band evoking the elements with splashes of piano and percussion  and Shadow Song creeps along with a sinister bass line with occasional flurries of violin, spooky indeed. Sweet Angela is a love song with a twist as the singer sits in the glow of a TV, his remote control out of reach but deciding that an anonymous woman on the screen would be the perfect replacement for “that bitch in Berlin”. The album closes with the claustrophobic existentialism of Franklin Avenue with Georg reimagining an encounter as the band achieve a perfect sense of bathos, a dreamlike evocation.

Dorado is a dark trip into the American psyche and should delight those who admire The Handsome Family and The Walkabouts, a band who infused a dark European feel into their lonesome laments.

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