Josh Martin seems more stunned by the success of Daughn Gibson than most anyone else. In 2012, Martin—the former drummer of a knotty blues-metal band and a big-rig driver to boot—released All Hell, his debut LP under a name just one fancy vowel sound removed from revered country crooner Don Gibson. All Hell arrived as an uncanny wonder, with Martin’s gorgeous and mysterious baritone presiding over an ad hoc band built of soul, country, and soundtrack samples he’d snipped from thrift-store finds. Martin bellowed elliptical tales where lovers discovered the worst in one another, smooth talkers seduced damsels, and daddies cursed the kids that fate had delivered.
A daring juxtaposition of disparate forms, it was issued in a tiny domestic edition of only 400 copies, marking it a curio meant for the few weirdos who might catch on. But a lot of people actually caught on—the press, a booking agent, slowly growing audiences, and the label Sub Pop, which signed Daughn Gibson just as All Hell’s dark gospel began to spread. Martin found himself fronting a band expected to tour and record. On 2013’s Me Moan and the uneasy new Carnation, he’s still trying to negotiate the sound of that unexpected future.
Like Me Moan, Carnation finds Martin stepping out of isolation and away from batches of samples to write and record with other musicians in real time. In 2013, the cast included Baroness’ John Baizley, Brokeback and Eleventh Dream Day guitarist Jim Elkington, and a small clutch of horn-and-string players. Here, he skips to a different scene, working with versatile Seattle producer Randall Dunn (Sunn O))), Marissa Nadler, Akron/Family) and a cast of Dunn standbys, including string arranger Eyvind Kang and former Earth multi-instrumentalist Steve Moore. Only Elkington returns. The performances and the production at large are impeccable. The band is as assured with the slinking poses of "It Wants Everything" as they are the sashaying cool of "For Every Bite" or the string-backed slowness of "Runaway and the Pyro".
But that variety—or, less generously, Martin’s halting stylistic indecision—plagues Carnation. For 38 minutes, he seems like an accidental bandleader who has no idea where he’s leading his band, let alone how to get them there. The rudiments of All Hell, from the country touches to the sampler obsession, survive only in the crevices—the baritone guitar echoing around the light new wave pulse of "Shatter You Through", the vocal loops bouncing beneath and around it. Martin loosens his grip on that once-dominant baritone, too, sometimes affecting a foppish British accent and occasionally slipping into lounge-singer softness. The indecision starts in the center and spreads, as Martin and crew work through homages to early Soft Machine and depressive Depeche Mode, coruscated Tangerine Dream and languid David Bowie. During "I Let Him Deal", he launches into a chorus that could be cut straight from the National’s catalog; for its chaser, "Shine of the Night", he nods to LCD Soundsystem and indulges a saxophone solo, even as he sings about staying alive on Iraq’s infamous Highway of Death. The first half of closer "Back with the Family" sounds like a Scott Walker fantasy, the second like a Tom Waitsnightmare. There are some bright spots here, especially in the grand attempts at pop, but Martin’s presiding confusion mitigates their album-length impact.
Worst of all, though, is the way these shifts hamper his songwriting. All Hell built big, poignant scenes out of tiny, perfect details. And for all its transitional woes, Me Moan showed Martin to be a vivid, sharp storyteller in the making. He loaded his lyrics with references and sly turns of phrase—the romantic at "the corner lobo solo … dreamin’ with the TV lit" or the widower trying to find nostalgic comfort in surrounding sounds and sights. But these lyrics are thin, limpid, and loose. The writing gathers a smattering of soft-focus snapshots, twisted aphorisms, and dimensionless characters. Martin gives us the teenager who’d rather hang himself than turn into a hideous man during "A Rope Ain’t Enough" and a young patient who's left a mental hospital during "Daddy I Cut My Hair". But we learn so little about each of them, their circumstances or their motives. They seem like mere verbal stand-ins for jams by the Daughn Gibson Big Band. If every Daughn Gibson song used to prompt a mental short film, Carnation is a collage of bad watercolors and corrupted Polaroids.
Gibson’s voice has always echoed another era, but his approach has seemed deliberately contemporary, too, eager to step over stylistic borders and bend the past against the present. Beyond his baritone or assorted honky-tonk accents, that quality is the essential link from All Hell to Me Moan to Carnation. But I like to imagine Daughn Gibson’s trajectory had All Hell been recorded and released in another epoch of the music industry, one where so many strange and stunning private-press records languished in obscurity until being rediscovered decades later. All Hell collected but 10 short songs, some of which seemed like sketches of a nebulous idea, with space for elaboration and edges for refinement. Without the need to meet public expectation or record label demands, what might that aesthetic have become in seclusion?
Perhaps he would have enriched the language and stretched the sounds, as he did on Me Moan. But it seems unlikely that being cloistered would have yielded a record like Carnation, a set of songs that discard almost all sense of Martin’s singularity in favor of a search for anything new that might work. Martin’s uniqueness was the very element that turned him from a tall dude with a deep voice making odd records on a tiny imprint to a troubadour enlisted in an indie empire. But some slight attention has spoiled his significant idiosyncrasy. On Carnation, he tries and fails to be something other than himself.
