In the High School of Regional America, the South's got all the musical cred. Sure, these days the Northeast has all the Industry power and all the hype-fueled products it produces, and other regions have their occasional heyday, but you can't front on the South-- that guy originated it all. Every so often, one of the other students tries to borrow some of the South's stature by osmosis; the Midwest pulled it off pretty well back in the day, and that exchange student England was practically humping his leg in the 60s & 70s. But it's the Northwest that's cultivating the strongest crush on the South today, that shy, skinny kid over in the corner, seeing in the South everything he's not.
The first sign of this infatuation was Doug Martsch, who released an eponymous solo album of acoustic beer-bottle slide ditties last year, and now the scene reports another member exhibiting symptoms of Delta flu. This time around it's Sam Coomes, better known as the angry half of Quasi, who can be found doing the Clapton with a decathlon of blues numbers under the guise of Blues Goblins. One can only imagine the further ramifications of this upper Pacific obsession: will Elliott Smith change his name to T-Bone? Is Ben Gibbard's next ultra-hit collab going to be with Kenny Wayne Shepard?
Now, this situation conjures up a whole lot of racial quicksand, a topic I'd just like to tree-swing over Pitfall-stylee, thank you very much (da naaaa, na na!). But I will put forth that it's not too unreasonable a claim to label indie rock and its sometimes-rampant EMOtions as the white blues, filled as it is with woman-done-me-wrong stories punctuated by tears falling on v-necks . And there's no denying Coomes is one of the best at this game, full of sing-along-able spite, with the implicit special effect that the very woman what done him wrong just might be the one keeping time in his band.
But Blues Goblins raises the question of whether Coomes is really playing to his strengths in concocting an all-blues cover project. In Quasi he tends to let the lyrics lower the pH while he flicks them out in a cruel monotone; here he's forced to fling his voice around like a Frisbee to hit all those mournful blues notes. Coomes is also best known for playing (and humping) his organ, which makes it a quizzical move for him to embrace a genre where success is so contingent on fret skills.
I'm no blues purist-- I'm not even much of a blues enjoyist-- but as I understand it, great blues overcomes the limitations and predictability of its form-letter structure through a certain kind of timbre, be it vocal or instrumental, that vividly expresses the musician's unique pain. Not to question Coomes' life experience, but his tools just aren't up to this task. In such unfamiliar territory, his voice sounds awkwardly pinched on standards like "Black Snake Moan" and "Hellhound on My Trail", not unlike when George Harrison turned to the blues. Meanwhile, his guitar tone is home-recorded to a studied level of grittiness, but is largely wasted on leaden noodling-- sometimes double-tracked for twice the ineffectiveness!-- over Skip James' "Drunken Spree" or his own "Pedro's Boogie".
These shortcomings are all reinforced by Coomes' doggedly faithful interpretations of most of these tunes, but even when liberties are taken, they're less than wise. Does Charlie Patton's intimate "Spoonful Blues" benefit from BOOM-BOOM drums? Did "Rollin and Tumblin" really need a six-minute free-jazz saxophone break, by a Zappa no less? Only "I've Been Treated Wrong", with its Organ of the Apocalypse breakdowns, finds Coomes bending the blues to his talents rather than vice versa.
Besides this outlier, Coomes sacrifices originality for reverence on his Blues Goblins project, treating it less as creative inspiration than as a costume-- as might be deduced by his ham-fisted choice of a pseudonym with the word "Blues" in it. One wonders what the dividends might've been had Sam enlisted his ex-wife's cyborg-with-a-heart-of-gold drumming rather than his own, ahem, pancake-handed style, or if he had adapted the form more than emulated it. Or maybe, like all shy, skinny kids, the Northwest, he just needs to be confident in his own strengths as a musician, and realize that imitating the effortless coolness of the South will get him nowhere.
