Austin quintet Knife in the Water have taken their moniker from the early Roman Polanski movie Nóz w Wodzie for a reason: the parallel between their music and the slow dread and bare-wrought tension of the film is uncanny. My first exposure to the band came nearly seven years ago, and it's weird to have that same 1998 debut album before me once again in a glossier, non-self-released edition. With a slightly separated remastering revealing the sharp edges of Cisco Ryder's restrained cymbals, Bill McCullough's smoky and swooping pedal steel, and John Brewington's rumbling bass, the debut remains as breathtaking as the first time I saw them, the solemn pacing of the disc as sure as a southern gentleman's gait, a Texas Two-Step, or Leatherface's limp (which may all be the same walk).
From the opening breath of their epic signature song, "One Sound", the whispered vocals and lonesome reverberations of guitarist Aaron Blount and the harmonic siren song and Baptist organ undertow of girlfriend Laura Krause suck me under. Their voices lace together like star-crossed white trash to stir up Blount's tales of the dark, silty bottom of the hick id. His tales drift between the honky-tonking body choppery of "I Sent You Up", to the more nuanced and character-driven dirge of "Married Woman", and back into more expansive moments of barren countryside dread for "Norma".
"Come on Cotton" and "Swallows", meanwhile, jangle just enough Galaxie 500 to keep the disc from slicing into the nearby wrist veins, but the abandoning sneer of "Muse" is downright cruel, and even that pales next to the album's most chilling track, "Careening", which reveals the band's oceanic depths. A haunting epic of bodily disintegration down in the greasy Gulf of Mexico, the drowning mind of the narrator spins final memories of kitchenettes, distant offspring, and spousal repugnance as the song drifts apart in waves of cymbal and the disembodied groans of Laura Krause, the tom and single bass tones ebbing like the tides.
If anything, their debut reminds me of the Coen Brothers' Blood Simple, with just a few rough elements sketching out the tragic folk and wronged lovers. Burning trailers, severed ears, hatchbacked wrecks along the highway, taps of unhooked screen doors-- these gruesome images flicker along with the entwined throats of the two singers. This edition tacks on a single recorded for Western Vinyl, which sounds lifted from the wax itself. "Slavery" is as standard as a Knife in the Water song can get, but "Redbird" is stripped to barely touched guitar and rattle. Here, the lovers assuage each other in the burnt-out remnants of the mobile, caressing their betrothed with broken bottles of Lone Star.
Red River somehow does their debut one better. The increased maturity here permeates everything: it's achingly slow Caesarian scars and bags under the eyes, and achingly slow movement; it's crow's feet and Hepatitis C and night sweats in the August air. A heavier drinking problem and taste for the harder stuff. The collated visions of the indescribable nights in South Texas are now recurring nightmare reruns at 3:00 a.m., the mini-thins still going strong as the TV irradiates the apartment with a ghostly blue light.
This time around the band sounds completely fleshed out; Bill McCullough's steel swells with feedback on "Watch Your Back", bludgeon in hand, or else sketches out the spacious Hill Country on "Machine to Tulsa". Cisco Ryder brushes the drums like swaying wheat from Days of Heaven, now crackling and snapping, now burning bright like a blaze. Laura Krause's organ playing has greater elasticity, and her supporting voice takes on more roles, from comforting nurse to hoary tranny-talk, along the way evoking Patsy Cline's "baum baums" as well as Nancy Sinatra's velvety lines. (The latter, of course, isn't a surprising influence, as the band make the Nancy and Lee Hazlewood gem "Sundown, Sundown" their own here.)
Blount's damned characters and purgatorial locales fall into even in sharper relief. "Rene" sits in a topless bar parking lot on the South side of town, a handgun in her lap, while visions of shooting her abusive lover in the face writhe before her eyes. A nameless transsexual washes up in "Young Blood in the River". The woozy "Party (for the People of the Open Wound)" pops pills and chugs keg beer on the east side of I-35 along with all the other revelers. This bleary-eyed chem delirium, conveyed with the sparsest of brush hits, string strokes, and breathless harmonizing, exemplifies what the band does best.
The last two songs, much as on the debut, serve as successive pinnacles of this sustained sound tension and bare narrative vision. The narcotic effects of the music and swirls of steel only appear to alleviate on "Broad Daylight", instead letting the ghastly images of botched amputations and sexual denigration twist about in the song, between the multiple meanings of "coming to/too." Original album-ender "Nightingales for Evelyn" involves box-cutter-sliced kids and splattered bird feathers lilting over a slow waltz, drifting into a dark puddle of blood beneath as "visions of glory collide."
Besides a poetic blurt by Bowers' beloved David Berman, the label has added to this reissue another single from around the period of the album's release: "2 Spades" and "Sunset Motel" are presented in reverse order, presumably to make the disc more cohesive. The B-side leans into some jerky-meat rockabilly recounting shallow graves and Russian roulette, while the latter is a pulpy seven minutes of organ gnashing, steel slashing, and motel murder mystery.
This all sets the table for the latest from the group, Cut the Cord. Five years on from their debut, their country overtones are subdued, palpable more in the songs added for the U.S. release than in the album proper. Aside from McCullough's continued steel contributions, only Blount and Krause remain intact, the rhythm section completely overhauled. Perhaps that's what makes the songs feel somewhat more stiff at the start, although as "The Very Air" plays through, it makes more sense. Reverberating thwacks and trickling lines of pedal shift into drive with the bass and drums and the measures are more propulsive and less lateral landscape. "Village Fireworks" mingles a booming bass drum with shimmering metallophones and Doppler organs as the two singers whisper a curse for the city that's "fucked itself." "Massacre" feverishly strums a guitar and a snare-rattling march as yet another drowning occurs between the minute details: "No termites in the rafters/ Needles stay upon the trees/ And lilies on the water/ She doesn't feel as heavy as she imagined."
Blount's songwriting has taken a turn for the more abstract and less Nowhere, USA noir. The readily-evoked highways and CrimeStopper scenes get replaced by temporal fireworks, sacrificial tigers, and lighthouses to the blind. "Biltmora Children" sketches out a tale of three children abandoned to the elements where "bloodbait brings a strangeness to the wild." The meanings remain vague, but the menace below the song-surface is still palpable, rippling like murder weapons in shallow water. The cello-kissed "Warped Pearls" is uncrackable: "Mother moth cocoon becomes a bloody mess/ Lights between the trees drinking antifreeze." All visual movement exists inside the heads of its characters now, filled with broken (and non-sensical) hallucinations that no longer tell their tales from the outside.
"My Skin Covers the Waterfront" wavers between images of Frankenstein and Ed Gein-stitched skin, but most mysterious is "Golden Calf Highway", a road trip between Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Badlands. It begins with a "Wagon Wheel"-type of loping cowboy beat while the singer, in death throes, sees young girls out the window "running naked in the rain/ Sawed off blows buckshot through the hay.../ Air warped by gasoline/ June bugs giving up in May/ Carcasses dot the golden calf highway." The lights grow increasingly dim as evil electronics and distorted blood drips rise up and overtake the disc in a bath of noise.
Pack 'em in as a band with that whole No Depression crowd, or other purveyors of Americana that dabble in that other great folk form (country music), which can include The Mekons, Nick Cave, Low, Palace, Califone, Calexico, The Handsome Family, Chicagoans and New Mexicans or whomever, their songs shine through like switchblades in the bar neon. How long can it be till Willie or Steve Earle is singing "I Sent You Up"? Three albums in, the couple evoke country's great duos, be it George and Tammy or Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, while also cutting a swath down South distinctly their own. Knife in the Water resonate with their own Texas twang and taint, burying clues and loads of bloody evidence in their wake.
