The first track on 13ghosts' fourth album is called "The Lonely Death of Space Avenger", and, true to its title, it's a spare, lonesome space-folktale of an astronaut facing the void-- their own "Space Oddity". Death inhabits every corner of The Strangest Colored Lights, investing the Birmingham, Ala., band's pitch-dark songs with a Southern gothic ambience and, somewhat ironically, enlivening the music considerably. It's a very different album from Cicada in 2005, in which they stacked one idea atop another like junk-pile architecture, artfully arranging the raw materials to sound artless-- not composed and recorded, but unearthed in some kudzu gully, carted home, and propped up in the backyard. It's fire-and-brimstone Southern indie, delivered by two gritty singer-songwriters and apparently featuring every musician in Jefferson County. The Strangest Colored Lights lacks its predecessor's compelling chaos, but its songs are slightly more streamlined and fleshed out, their clear beginnings and endings recalling even earlier albums like 2002's Your Window Is Burning.
One half of the songwriting team behind 13ghosts, Brad Armstrong sings like Richard Buckner at a closed-casket viewing and favors intensely Book of Revelations imagery. "The wind will fall, and the blackbird will dance with the worm," he sings on "Bury Me" (perhaps an affirmative response to the old hymn "Oh Bury Me Not"), between blasts of bluesy harmonica. "The moon will call, and the black snake she swallows the world." Rarely does indie rock examine decomposition, much less make it seem so mystical, like a new trickster mythology. By contrast, Buzz Russell's drawl sounds slightly more commonplace, although more conspiratorial in its tone, as if he's singing to an audience rather than to the firmament. Against guitars that alternate between dreamy and abrasive, "Faint Goat" portrays a high school outsider, a kind of Weird Harold who's good at poetry and ballet, but forgoes sympathy for tauntingly brutal honesty: "Hey faint goat, where's your nanny now? Were you left here to save the world?"
Together, Armstrong and Russell form a sort of deep-fried Gutter Twins, and their obsession with mortality makes them musically omnivorous, as if they must digest as much as possible in their allotted time on Earth. As a result, 13ghosts continue to reinvent themselves with every song, trying on new sounds and styles to see what fits. Russell's "Riverside" rumbles with Carnival of Souls organ, then erupts with funereal horns and Morricone guitar, like Calexico playing a New Orleans funeral. "Go to Sleep" trips along on a modified reggae rhythm, while a drum machine cajoles the subdued "Whip Poor Will". Armstrong's "Soon When I'm Gone" rewrites a Gram Parsons ballad as deathbed transference: "I hear the clatter of the beetle as she waits for me to tire," Armstrong sings, as if absorbing into the cosmos, the songs swirling psychedelically around him. "I hear the breathing of the earthworm as she crawls a ragged mile.
The Strangest Colored Lights ends not with the George Harrison-style finale of "Transmissions", as the tracklist indicates, but with an untitled hidden track that features Armstrong singing about fictional artists who never showed their work. One sings her songs into a jar, which she buries deep in the earth; another has his poems eaten by foxes. Despite being locked in the basement of the album, the song reveals 13ghosts' true concerns: Can making art make them immortal? Ultimately, all this talk of death might be too much too bear were it not for the range of sounds swirling around it: The Strangest Colored Lights is a persistently somber, mostly humorless album, but it's so musically vigorous that you wouldn't mind if they dwelt on death for the rest of their lives.
