So much in music seems mysterious, though it's carefully dissected and explained in textbooks and newsgroups everywhere, to the point of sterilization. So it's become the acceptable social practice not to delve too deeply into how the music works. If music didn't contain some inherently mysterious quality, analysis and deconstruction would threaten to strip away anything that made it unusual, and consequently our interest. But we still love the stuff.
What theoretical analysis of music cannot uncover is the inherent mystical understanding we have with it. If notes and words and beats are the parts, and if the sum of any piece worth its mortar is always greater than all of those, then pinning down anything concrete about good music seems to have been a fairly odd objective for me to write about from the start.
The Skull Mailbox and Other Horrors is a free-form narrative about all things strange and dark, related to rural horrors and deep-seated fears mistakenly diagnosed as insanity. Bob Drake sings about being pulled upstairs against your will, and not trying to fight the ghosts. His macabre vision, with a preference for skewed beauty and purposely misleading moments of clarity, is the driving force behind some very colorful music, and probably the reason why describing his music is so difficult. This is unsettling stuff. Sometimes it seems funny, in a humiliatingly hopeless kind of way, as he lets on with the ghost-upstairs song ("You Can't Outwit That Thing"). The mix of psychological stress, garage-symphony grandeur and folk-ish retelling of very familiar horror stories (or at least scenarios) tends to defy analysis.
Drake has been around. He started out playing bass and singing a bit in the 80's with indie-prog heroes Thinking Plague and Hail. Their brand of quirky, dissonant music has made them very popular in straight prog circles, though Drake really didn't cross into the mainstream until he began engineering and producing pop acts. His resume includes work with Ice Cube, Quincy Jones, Tina Turner and George Clinton, in addition to lending his hands to recent Faust and Henry Cow remasters. Drake is big fucking time, though is apparently none too fond of the spotlight, holing up in the south of France in his home studio. The Skull Mailbox is his fourth solo release, and similar to his previous records, features his highly unorthodox production effects, bluegrass-meets-Steve Howe guitar playing and immediately noticeable vocals. To my ears, he sings like Van Dyke Parks in the low register, Jon Anderson in the high.
As mentioned, this record covers hauntings and other horrors. "They Live in the Well" opens with a bit of semi-classical guitar, mixed with a slight folky lilt. Drake's phrasing is off-kilter to a fault. A typical line of verse goes: "If you take the wrong turn off that old dirt road, near that town where they all went insane/ There's a patch of blasted weeds where a house used to stand." No extraneous rhyming or anything, though the melody wouldn't sound out of place on a Tom Waits record. And like Waits, Drake isn't afraid to strike up the pump organ for color. The opening guitar figure returns at the end, and the whole thing is wrapped up in a minute-and-a-half. The Skull Mailbox crams a whopping 27 songs in the span of about 45 minutes.
"The Tower" features more trad-folk guitar and accordion, and could almost pass for an outtake from The Band, if they were going for a cornfield-haunting vibe. "Cellar of Madness" goes a bit over the top, with Drake's chorus of moaning near the middle, though the upbeat violin and accordion take some of the edge off the song's general paranoia. Taking the edge off seems to be one of Drake's strengths, as the gorgeous arpeggios of "The Box in the Orchard" and its accompanying slide guitar solo almost make you forget he's singing about finding someone's old hair and bones inside a buried box.
Elsewhere, Drake's more experimental background comes to the fore. "The Miraculous Reliquary" begins with about a minute of approaching noise, like a rusty old train grinding its way closer to your right speaker, stopping just short of a rake in front of the station. Drake places shadowy guitar figures underneath a few layers of ambient unrest (and this is real ambience, recorded in his barn studio, outside noises included), while he sings of hidden items kept in a church room "that should not be." The song's coda leaps out of the muck as Drake holds back for a second, before proclaiming he saw a light "ascending into heaven!" over a distorted symphonic crescendo. If movie soundtracks were this good, no one would have to go to movies.
The best thing about a record like this is not in its cool little vignettes, but in the way they all seem to be woven together. Most of the tunes pass by before you really have a chance to discern what has happened, and by the end, you might feel like you missed something. In truth, Drake's music is rather complicated, with plenty of intricate guitar playing and dense arrangements. Furthermore, despite his pedigree as a producer, he favors very messy mixes, usually with stuff most people would consider 'mistakes' left in. On the other hand, this is probably another reason why The Skull Mailbox is such a compelling listen. Drake hasn't given me anything to hang a cliche or well-worn critical point of contention on. And I can't quite explain why his folk-horror-avant-semi-classical hybrid should sound so good-- but it does.
