Think of Elvis Perkins' music as a feat of structural engineering: Despite the massive weight of its cargo, it still manages to float, even cruise. His grief-drenched 2007 debut, Ash Wednesday, explicitly and covertly referenced the death of his photographer mother in the 9/11 attacks and his actor father's from AIDS complications a decade earlier. Yet the record wasn't really depressing. It was melancholy, ruminative, allusive, and droll perhaps but also amazingly light on its feet, thanks to the tasteful brass, strings, and percussion that skirted Perkins' reedy tenor and acoustic guitar. Lyrics are the sine qua non of the troubadour game, and Perkins has shown he has a skillful way with words. "I waited for the riddled sky to be solved again by the sunrise/ I've made a death suit for life for my father's ill widowed wife" he sang in "While You Were Sleeping," the exquisitely moving Ash Wednesday opener that earned him the "next Dylan" albatross for his troubles.
Track one is again the standout on second LP, Elvis Perkins in Dearland, an album that formally incorporates Perkins' three-piece touring band (among them, the trio play an impressive 10 instruments, including saxophone, harmonium, and clarinet). And if it wasn't already clear that the Dylan comparison is a nonstarter, Perkins proves an able bandleader, both charismatic and comfortable ceding the stage to his mates. Like a florescent bulb gradually growing to full vibrancy, "Shampoo" fades in on a dense swarm of whistles, strummed guitar and damp organ before a crisp, snapped snare kicks off the terrific folk-rocker proper. It's unambiguously a band, not a singer-songwriter, performance.
The lyrics' opacity make it hard to say for sure, but I like to think "Shampoo" cites director Hal Ashby's 1975 comic yet caustic referendum on 60s counterculture (set on the cusp of Richard Nixon's 1968 election win), a film that begins as a sexual morality tale and ends as a mortality one. "I don't want to die/ However dark tomorrow may be," Perkins sing-slurs from our own anxious political/cultural crossroads. Given his personal history, it's easy to imagine him, at that moment, as a sort of sacrificial lamb/prophet.
As "Shampoo" hints ("Black is the color of my true love's arrow/ Black is the color of my blood" inverts an amorous blues convention) Perkins has sloughed many of his earlier folk influences for the R&B base of nascent rock. On "Hey", the bopping upright bass, shadowy female harmonies (courtesy of Lavender Diamond's Becky Stark), and Perkins' strangulated basso profundo growl transport the song back half a century, or at least as far as the Fat Elvis era. "Hours Last Stand" is a straight-up Mississippi river-dredger (even if Perkins' voice will always sound more like Woody Guthrie's than Robert Johnson's); the bright and brassy "Doomsday" shoots for a New Orleans funeral vibe; and "I Heard Your Voice in Dresden" could be one of Buddy Holly's, replete with Lone Star hiccupped hollers.
Decent as these tracks are, the rest of the album never quite lives up to "Shampoo"'s potential. And songs like "I'll Be Arriving" and closer "How's Forever Been Baby", whose harmonica whine is more giggle-inducing than profound, are lead anchors. Fortunately, such maudlin moves are rare and Perkins' ability to air out material that continues to brood on death, abandonment and ordinary ol' breakups is a credit to his good songwriting and arranging. The guy's probably got a superb album in him; Dearland, however, isn't it.
