The sticker on the jewel case of my copy of Puerto Muerto's Songs of Muerto County proudly proclaims the album "a 'lost' soundtrack to the TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE." It's an audacious claim, as the album is not "lost" and postdates the movie by more than thirty years. Instead, it's actually an homage to the scariest and most brutal 70s horror film, which was set in the fictional Muerto County, home of the most terrifying family in Texas (okay, the second most terrifying). No strangers to carnage (previous albums include See You in Hell and Your Bloated Corpse Has Washed Ashore), the Chicago-based duo of Tim Kelley and Christa Meyer were inspired by Tobe Hooper and Wayne Bell's atmospheric and often atonal noise soundtrack and the generic country tunes that eerily emanate from every radio frequency within county lines. Unlike that "lost" Wizard of Oz soundtrack called Dark Side of the Moon, Songs of Muerto County is not meant to match up song for scene, but rather to evoke through music the creepy otherworldliness of the flat, hot Texas landscape, remote and craggy with cedar underbrush, and to create a macabre setting wherein a John Larroquette voiceover would not be out of place.
While the mission is different, the music and the Americana setting are similar to Pinetop Seven's reimaginings of silent films like The Wind and Laugh, Clown, Laugh. If the source material is much more notorious, Songs of Muerto County transcends its audacious gimmick because Puerto Muerto are interested neither in retelling the story through song (Alice's Chainsaw Massacree, anyone?) nor in explaining away the horrors perpetrated in the film (one of the 2003 remake's many fatal flaws). Instead, Meyer and Kelley take inspiration from the incidental music and evoke that wide-open claustrophobia-- all that room to run, but nowhere to hide.
The first half of Songs of Muerto County sets up musical themes and tones that reappear throughout the album, suggesting that country music has the potential to be much creepier than the corporate metal that fills so many horror soundtracks. Over Kelley's dusty acoustic guitar melody, Meyer sings the introductory warnings of the lead-off track, "Muerto County", but mostly she relies on wordless aah-aah's, which subtly mimic a spooky pedal steel and imbue "Ghostee" and "Walking" with a nightfall dread. The second half of the album translates those melodies to more traditional settings, creating songs that have no narrative relation to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre but would sound perfectly creepy crackling from the dash speakers of that soon-to-be-abandoned van or from a grimy gas station radio. "What Have I Done?" and "Apple Pie" are ramshackle C&W; songs well suited to Kelley's unpretentious vocals. He plugs in his guitar for "Cherries" and "Road Song", whose relentless, percussive riff hammers home the song's cautionary lyrics. Aside from "Walking", which is interrupted halfway through by a violent burst of noise, these songs benefit from a lack of special effects, a no-budget aesthetic that informs the simplicity of Meyer's waltzing "Wondering" and the knife-sharp strums of closer "Goodbye".
There's a fine-line restraint to Songs of Muerto County: on one hand, Kelley and Meyer adhere to the traditional adage that a good soundtrack should not be more memorable than the film it supports. On the other, they aren't actually making a soundtrack, but a record that must stand on its own despite its inspiration. Occasionally, the album sounds too beholden to its source material-- music to dismember your victims by. At its best, however, Songs of Muerto County refrains from stating anything outright, the songs merely suggesting their emotional terrors and-- like the film-- leaving the hideous details to your imagination.
