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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The Chilli Dogs. “On A Roll”

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There was a movie years ago called “Support Your Local Sheriff” and I’m sure that over the years there have been numerous “support your local band” slogans thrown around. Well, here’s our turn to hold that banner high. While gig going and seeing your heroes on stage is as fine a thrill as can be had there’s much to be said for having a local band that you can drop in on and depend on for a fine night of well played and well selected songs. Cover versions perhaps but played with dexterity and a finely honed sense of homage to the masters. Best heard in a bar, an indulgence for the band (who probably all have day jobs) and for the audience (for whom beers will flow) but ultimately all part of the musical mindscape that folk who read blogs like this inhabit.
The Chilli Dogs are one such conglomeration. They dwell on the classic Americana songbook (folk, blues, jazz, country, singer songwriter, L.A. canyon rock and all points between) and can usually be seen and heard in the folk and drinking dens of Edinburgh. Back in the days they would be so local as to be only available to local folk but due to the wonders of digital recording they’ve unveiled an album that shamelessly exposes them to the wider world, to their credit they avoid blushes and display their wares with a flourish.
Recorded in a living room the album features ten Chilli Dogs in various permutations on 15 songs written by artists as varied as Lowell George, Blind Blake, The Grateful Dead, John Prine and Sonny Boy Williamson. The basic sound is acoustic, string based music although there is some fine electric guitar from Jonathon Hearn. Fiddles blaze, guitars resonate and slide, accordions wheeze and over all this lead vocals are swapped from song to song. In fact the varied menu does its best to approximate a gig set list so that one minute you’re in Louisiana Cajun country and the next grooving to a nasty Chicago blues groove. With the opportunity to flesh out the bones of their acoustic pub sets there are some fine touches such as the organ on Help Me and the revivalist tent sounds on The Old Purple Tin, a tremendous demon drink sound (originally by The Alabama 3). With the majority of the songs covered here familiar to anyone with a decent record collection The Chilli Dogs don’t claim to improve on the originals but there’s no denying the sense of fun and joy they’ve had recording this. Songs like Before I Grow too Old, a Fats Domino song but here using the Tommy McLain arrangement from the tremendous Charlie Gillet compilation Another Saturday Night, show that they know their stuff. The best is the closing arrangement of No More Cane on the Brazos where the whole ensemble join in the singing bringing a fine little album to a fine end.
The album is a perfect souvenir for anyone who catches the band live and in the spirit of the opening sentence above well recommended for anyone wanting to support some local musicians. The album is available at their gigs, the next one at the Royal Oak this Thursday. Alternatively you can download it
here

No More Cane On The Brazos

Mark Bates. Down The Narrow.

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Mark Bates is a youthful chap from West Virginia who has produced an album chockfull of the contradictions inherent in the music of the American south. Ostensibly a God fearin’ population, scratch the surface and there is sex, crime, fear and darkness. Bates was raised in a church going family and drank in the waters of this duality. He sings with passion of whores, murder and alcohol, ingrained with the spirit of the area. With a mixture of blues soaked tales, soiled ballads and country tunes Bates’ piano is well supported by an able musical cast with guitarist Duke Levine and on keyboards Michael Bellar shining in particular.
Forbidden Love thumps along with a southern swampy edge and while the lyrics are a compendium of voodoo and dirty love clichés the delivery is excellent, muscular and gripping. In the same vein Daisy is a dirty sounding blues slugger with Hammond organ and biting guitar as Bates describes the eponymous Daisy who smells like a polecat and never takes a shower. Shotgun with the Devil starts with a skeletal banjo and percussion that sounds like agitated crickets as Bates visits again a southern trope, the musician’s meeting with Old Nick. This is a claustrophobic and suspense filled song that builds in atmosphere with a sense of doom.
Away from the blues The Promised Land is a tale of murder and retribution told in a time tried tradition, an excellent story that is buttressed by fine playing almost as if The Band had taken an old country tune and handed it to Bates. Go On takes on an approximation of Mercury Rev’s take on the Band with what seems to a musical saw offering celestial swoons on a superior piano ballad.
A Drunkard’s Tale is perhaps the most dramatic song here and certainly the one that will get mentioned in reviews. Personally I think it’s one of the weaker songs with too much melodrama and with Bates trying just too hard to reach a higher register in his vocals, this is a song that Tom Waits might carry off but Bates just doesn’t have that gravitas and deadpan beatness.
The one cover here, Townes Van Zandt’s Flying Shoes is given a very successful and dynamic reading which fits well with the overall sense of the album The last song is a vaudevillian romp called Death Sucks which conjures up a New Orleans jazz line on a morbidly bleak of family fault lines at a funeral and provides a fitting end to a fine album.
You can buy it here
and listen to some of the songs here