To hear Ethan Miller tell it, Howlin Rain hit rock bottom after leaving American Recordings, a brief tenure that produced only one album, 2012’s non-starter The Russian Wilds, and nearly destroyed the band. The line-up dissolved, and Miller was left more or less where he started, the lone Raindrop trying to keep the band moving along. Following last year’s Live Rain, which sounded less like a tour document than an exorcism, Mansion Songs is intended to signal a rebirth: Miller worked with co-producer Eric Bauer in San Francisco, using a variety of musicians rather than a concrete band roster. He has suggested that the album will be the first in a trilogy, and that disorienting cover shot literally shows Miller turning a corner.
Mansion Songs does prove to be a pivotal album, especially because it sounds like Miller’s cleanest break from the crunch and grind of his former outfit Comets on Fire. He’s in full classic-rock mode here, summoning the ghosts of the Fillmore West on these eight songs. It’s not an album about the industry, and that is certainly to Miller’s credit; self-pity and bitterness are tedious topics for rock songs. Instead, this may be closer to a junkie record. "Big Red Moon" opens in the "ghetto alleys and skid row bars" of the Mission District, where Miller romanticizes the culture of addiction with lines like "Tonight we’ll be kinsmen to the stars." Later he admits, "There’s slime running in my veins, mold on the walls of my heart."
Especially when it’s delivered in Miller’s baroque gutter imagery, the down-and-out nature of addiction proves a problematic metaphor for professional woes, but really that’s the least of this album’s troubles. By embracing classic rock so wholeheartedly, Howlin Rain has become essentially a jam band, with little but its own history to distinguish it from acts like J.J. Grey & Mofro and the dear-departed Black Crowes. Those bands at least know something about rhythm and boogie, yet songs like "Wild Bush" and "Meet Me in the Wheat", with its hallelujah chorus, sound stiffly dramatic, resorting to the same grandiose choruses. Burrowing into his rock-and-roll shaman persona, Miller overenunciates wildly, less Dead than Joplin at her booziest, escalating too readily into histrionics. By the time "Coliseum" builds from its quiet opening to its thunderous climax, he’s bellowing ostentatiously, yet his vocals convey only the vaguest emotion.
Mansion Songs ends with the seven-minute "Ceiling Fan", a spoken-word number that allows Miller to indulge his Beat aspirations alongside his classic-rock signifiers. Musically, it’s the grittiest-sounding track on the album, with eddies and distortion clotting the guitar licks and evoking the more destitute vistas of San Francisco. Lyrically, however, the song sounds entirely disingenuous, as Miller namedrops Werner Herzog, Federico Fellini, Walt Whitman, Bob Dylan, J.G. Ballard, and even that old stand-by, William Blake. It’s a distracting tactic, a curious way for a bold artist to defer to the spines on his bookshelf. As a result, when Miller shouts out to all the underrepresented subcultures around the Bay—a moment that really ought to be the climax of both the album and his career, a moment that should point the way forward for a hard-luck musician—he simply gets lost in his raft of influences.
