Having a voice like Daughn Gibson’s must be kind of a burden. It’s such a deep, sonorous, chesty thing that carrying it around must weigh on him, and every lyric feels like a bench press. It’s a physical gift that doubles as a restriction. When you’ve got the ability to conjure Johnny Cash or any other basso profundo like Gibson, your artistic direction is laid out for you-- you’re probably not gonna make punk or R&B. That was quite all right on last year’s All Hell, an intriguing confluence of sampling and songwriting. It was something like Odelay if Beck's record was culled entirely from episodes of "Cops" and the kind of country cassettes available at truckstops. Otherwise, it sounded like nothing else. On Me Moan, his Sub Pop debut*,* Gibson wisely attempts to maintain the immediate draw of his authoritative vocals and perspective without making an exact replica of his first album. It’s an uneven record that lacks the spark of its predecessor, but a more diverse and accessible follow-up from an artist who’s laudably willing to take risks.
Compared to All Hell, Me Moan is more an album of various “songs” than a unified sound. And now, Gibson is coaxing music out of human beings (including members of Baroness and Brokeback) rather than samplers. He’s still treating it all like a rummage sale, even if the budget has emboldened his taste for chintz and levity. Gibson’s voice will undoubtedly draw more comparisons to golden country greats, though the closest Me Moan gets to any sort of “roots” music might be the cocaine cowboy balladry of “Won’t You Climb”. Otherwise, the songs here are pieced together with bagpipes, melodica, drum machines, and warped samples, adding rhinestone to Gibson’s trucker flannels. Even the one thing that sounds like it could be plucked out under the Mississippi moonlight (“All My Days Off”) has a riff that could easily segue into David Banner’s “Cadillac On 22’s”.
But there’s the burden of his voice: like the terribly uncoordinated klutz who got put on the basketball team because he’s the tallest guy in school or the diffident offensive lineman with the thyroid condition, Gibson can seem pressed into action out of some kind of physical obligation. You just can’t hide with that baritone and so Gibson figures he might as well stand out as much as possible. The choruses of “Phantom Rider” and “Mad Ocean” teeter on kitsch based solely on their lyrics and Gibson delivers them with extra “we’re gonna move that convoy” gusto.
This approach works on Me Moan’s more campy material, but when he tries to convey menace over Alabama 3-style beats on “You Don’t Fade”, he sounds retrograde instead of classicist; all that's missing is a video of Gibson chomping a cigar on the New Jersey Turnpike. Gibson’s hampered on the emotionally bare songs as well. “Franco” is Me Moan’s most immediately striking number, with chalky guitar harmonics and sobering reverb evoking a slippery-when-wet power ballad that shifts the focus from the docks of New Jersey to a trailer park somewhere. The ache in the chorus is palpable, as Gibson yearns to a tired lover, “I wish we had a kid that never wanted to die.” It’s a situation that begs for an earnest performance, but Gibson leans hard on the vowels in “campfire” and "hour" to the point where they sound like they’re curdling in his mouth ("camp-foyer" and "orrrrrrr," respectively). “Franco” is meant to be a tearjerker, but sometimes it feels like it’s poking you in the eye.
Otherwise, there’s a glaring disjunction between the detail of the music and the lack thereof in Gibson’s lyrics. Me Moan leaves a little too much to the imagination, and you might think that a year as a touring musician didn’t give Gibson as much raw material as his time in the cabin of an 18-wheeler. His more suggestive form of storytelling works on “The Sound of Law”: Gibson’s born on the roadside to an outlaw, more specifically, a beast of a man who doesn’t just kill, he “blows that fucker off to hell.” Though specifics are scarce, the music lets you fill in the blanks, as the charging drum rolls and girded guitar riffs generate the momentum of a moving train, plotting a perfect visual for a family that has to up and leave town at the faintest whine of a police siren.
But elsewhere, while the tone of Gibson’s vocals convey truth and wisdom, the songs rarely feel populated with fully drawn characters or narratives. Places like Lynn Falls and Pisgee Nest and the Rio Bar and Grill sound like where a character in a Daughn Gibson song might hang out, even if they’re not necessarily real. Over the span of Me Moan, this lack of geography starts to wear. Both “The Pisgee Nest” and “Kissin on the Blacktop” have evocative lines in their choruses that makes you want to lean in closer; yet they’re incomplete, memories or images of a state trooper’s daughter or a devious middle school friend that he couldn’t quite bring to life just yet. The result doesn’t take Gibson’s music off the open road, it just replaces mystery with mundanity: while All Hell felt imbued with danger and intrigue, on Me Moan, the people pulled off to highway shoulder are never in any real distress upon closer inspection. They just stepped out to check a map.
