The Roadside Graves are such an awesomely named band that you have to think somewhere there's a metal act kicking itself for not coming up with the sobriquet first. The evocatively dubbed New Jersey seven-piece may actually ply its trade in shambling folk-rock, but don't think for an instant this group's not worthy of its morbid moniker, not when the band's newest album, My Son's Home, is so deeply, resolutely soaked in bodily and spiritual dissolution.
First things first, however, listening to the Roadside Graves does require a certain suspension of disbelief. These guys have taken a significant number of pages from Bob Dylan and the Band's Basement Tapes playbook, which I guess makes them doubly antiquated by dint of borrowing heavily from 60s musicians who were themselves resurrecting early 20th century song forms. Lead singer John Gleason warbles in a wavering whine that's cousin to Dylan's legendary wheeze, and musically the group makes liberal use of accordion, organ, and barroom ivories. The women you meet in these songs are going to have names like Ruby and Delia that nobody under the age of 80 actually owns anymore.
Certainly these moldy affectations can be an impediment when you're trying to enjoy music on your iPod in 2009, but if you'll allow the Graves their need to play dress-up, My Son's Home is well-stocked with stirring narratives and sketches that just happen to be almost unremittingly obsessed with the crypt. Yet what's really remarkable about the record is the band's ability to treat death from so many different perspectives and with such a widely divergent range of moods and sympathies. There are moments of haunting, fragile stillness here, particularly the Josh Ritter-ish "Wooden Walls" and the elegiac, mandolin-trilling "To the Sea", yet anger flares up too, in the bitter "God Touched Me", a bravura mini-epic that initially rides a pulsing, faintly malevolent organ but resolves on a harmony-laden outro that evokes a demented "Hey Jude".
As war is one of death's most helpful earthly engineers, it should be no surprise that armed combat is such a heavily recurring motif on the album as well, starting with its title track, a heartbreakingly precise snapshot of a family awaiting the return of their solider son, possibly in a coffin. Elsewhere, there are images of flowers on a brother's grave "next to his number and name," a leg lost presumably in battle and a narrator who "left a path of blood back in Vietnam."
Perhaps most admirably of all, the Roadside Graves excel at the brave and difficult paradox of suffusing death with life, injecting vivacity and humor into their reflections on mortality. Musically, the boozily raucous, devil-may-care singalong "Ruby" proves someone in the band's been listening to The Pogues, while lyrically it erases the line between sex and death until they're literally under the same roof (grandma dead in her chair with a cigarette in hand while "you and I were on the couch touching each other"). "Dirty Work" revels in the same messy collision, mentioning a hearse and a father in the past tense yet concluding with a guy apparently pleasuring himself in the corner of an Elks Lodge's kitchen. And of course there's a murder ballad of sorts to boot, "Where the Water Flows", though in this case it's sporting a bristling college-rock riff to complement a tale wherein "I followed her by the light of the moon" gives way to "they found her by the side of the road." No time to dig a hole for this unfortunate victim, however-- the Roadside Graves have already moved on to the next last throes, the next death rattle.
