Unless you’ve spent at least a few of your formative years in Florida, you can’t know how uniquely shitty Florida can be for a young person. There’s a vibrant music scene there, of course, but it’s a direct outgrowth of a climate—economic, political, and cultural as well as meteorological—that can be suffocating. This is the land that nursed Deicide andAssück, Floor and Against Me!, Neon Blud and Cult Ritual. More recently, it also birthed the Ukiah Drag. Featuring members of, among other outfits, the aforementioned Neon Blud and Cult Ritual, the band hails from the Tampa and Gainesville areas, two of the state’s most fertile musical hotbeds. They’ve played alongside members of Merchandise, who took them on tour this past June. But the best thing about the Ukiah Drag’s debut album, In The Reaper’s Quarters, isn’t how much it embodies some hypothetical spirit or ethic of Florida; it’s how much the record, like Merchandise’s new After the End, strives to be somewhere else entirely.
In The Reaper’s Quarters was presaged by last year's four-song cassette Jazz Mama Is Cryin, which staked an immediate claim on entirely alien territory: some imagined badland where the Gun Club’s death-blues, the Birthday Party’s cock-goth, and Destruction Unit’s sandblasted drones overlap. Frontman ZZ Ramiriez, though, comes from an even stranger domain. On “The Rat's Waltz”, which appeared in a more lo-fi version on Jazz Mama, he surfs curdled waves of distortion so dark they can’t be seen through; beneath him a wah pedal squeals queasily like a lizard being gently stepped on. But instead of howling like Nick Cave and his ilk, he sneers with creepy, adenoidal geekiness— Stan Ridgway hosting a Halloween party as the Crypt Keeper, cranking his Mexican radio until the air turns to goo.
The Ukiah Drag’s list of influences stray a bit too far afield on “Wait and See”, a cover of the Lee Hazlewood song that doesn’t do enough to distinguish itself from the admittedly gorgeous original; the barrel-chested vocals wind up resembling Calvin Johnson, and not in a good way. There’s a jarring, melancholy sincerity to the song that doesn’t sit well with the Ukiah Drag’s swamp-ass psychedelia, although it’s salvaged somewhat by a lazily monstrous guitar solo. Taken together, “Final Prayer” and “Drip from the Fang” offer the most concentrated burst of rancid bog-juice that In The Reaper’s Quarter keeps on tap. Situated back-to-back, the two songs span the band’s gleefully constricted scope: “Drip from the Fang” coils and springs like rusted clockwork, a snake with its head cut off and unable to tell that it’s no longer alive. That twitchy, zombie-like vibe subsides to a simmer on “Final Prayer”. Stitched together out of poltergeist moans, dry-ice fog, and twangy licks that crawl about with their bellies in the dust, the track lurches and lumbers as Ramiriez sets his bleary sights on the mirage-haunted horizon: “Next to you/ In your kingdom/ That’s where I want to live/ Take me there.”
The Ukiah Drag no longer reside in Florida, and perhaps that’s telling; many of the great bands in the state’s history got the hell out of there as soon as they could, too. The group is now in self-imposed “New England exile,” and In The Reaper’s Quarters was recorded in New York, “off the banks of the Hudson River,” according to them, produced by the Men's Ben Greenberg. Still, the album evokes the essential otherness of Florida, if not the stifling essence of Florida itself, and that’s for the best. Plagued by affluent retirees, voter suppression, and sinkholes, for fuck’s sake, Florida is—amid all its lushness—a place of death and decay, the reaper’s quarters, indeed. “Diggin’ down deep!” Ramiriez yelps on the lopsided, organ-soaked “Her Royal Grip”, knowing full well that Florida, barely above sea level, isn’t a place where you can dig very deep at all. Then he adds, his voice like thickening quicksand, “You ain’t goin’ nowhere/ ’Cause there’s nowhere to go.” In The Ukiah Drag’s eyes, geography is neither a trap nor a means of escape. It’s a shallow grave to play in.
