Howlin' Ghost Proletarians - The Singer

Absurd/Phase!
#56/PHR-22

Conceived as an homage to Johnny Cash, the interior sleeve of “The Singer” contains a passage (in French) from Cormac McCarthy’s “Outer Dark” and the general tone of the disc is, indeed, somewhere on the nether side of Cash at his most anguished even if it never quite achieves McCarthy-ian depths of bleakness. The music of Loren Connors might be the most appropriate point of comparison.

Fabrice Eglin (guitars, slide guitar, amp) and Michel Henritzi (guitars, slide guitar, amp, harmonica) fashion nine blues-drenched songs, chain-draggingly slow and rough, seemingly designed as evocations of the blood soaked, unrelentingly harsh Western vistas encountered in McCarthy’s novels. Guitar lines regularly morph into feedback howls while laboriously pushing their way through clouds of dust and mounds of carrion. While the pieces are generally effective, they’re also similarly so with not so much to differentiate over the course of the disc, though the quieter works (such as the two “Outer Dark” songs) do camp out in an even sparser, dustier terrain. This kind of “monotony” may well be intentional, serving as a metaphor for a day after day trek over brutal land and, if approached with that idea in mind, the album works quite successfully. If listened to in hope of more elaborate variations, one might be disappointed, but as a whole, ‘The Singer” functions well as a grim, forlorn, not unsentimental slab of hurt.

absurd

phase!