For D. Charles Speer, a veteran of New York's No-Neck Blues Band, there's not much difference between the honkytonks of the American South and the tekedes of early 20th century Greece. They may be geographically and culturally divergent, but both are centered around drugs-- alcohol and pot in honkytonks, hashish in tekedes-- and both are associated with very specific musical traditions. Speer explores these two worlds on his two new albums, revealing a common guiding principle: namely, a disdain for hard song structures in favor of inquisitive spontaneity.
The primarily instrumental Arghiledes is a solo record in every sense: Speer played and overdubbed all the instruments, treated the sounds, and produced the record. He alternates between bouzouki and baglamas, then adds percussion, organ, and occasionally electric guitar to create spiraling drones. "Tsamiko Hijaz" features some spellbinding percussion, and in one of the more productive avenues, "The Heavy Heart of Ando-Yeap" melds those traditional Greek ideas with psychedelic-rock sounds. The album works best when Speer lets these musical ideas play out patiently, but it stumbles whenever he adds vocals. The guttural chanting on "Harmanis" is more cartoonish than narcotic, and at times Speer grunts and huffs-- presumably in English-- like Tom Waits, creating a commotion that distracts from graceful filigrees of acoustic guitar. Arghiledes sounds oddly aloof and self-indulgent, as though alienation were Speer's goal. If so, he achieves it too often.
Leaving the Commonwealth is warmer in its appropriation of outlaw country, although it's a similarly academic endeavor. Speer buys into the whole redneck-hippie ethos that catapulted country music into the mainstream during the 1970s; Willie Nelson is to this record what bouzouki master Markos Vamvakaris is to Arghiledes. So many years later, however, it's just as impossible to recapture that sound and especially that sensibility as it is to evoke the smoky atmosphere of the tekedes, which makes Leaving the Commonwealth sound a bit too self-aware, even kitschy at times. When Speer begins talking his way through the end of "Cumberland" and describing a stock Southern eccentric character, he sounds more redneck-hipster than redneck-hippie.
Although he hews a bit too closely to country's stock themes, Speer's songwriting can be surprisingly adventurous and spry, and his deep, granular voice is ideally suited to the honkytonk. And whenever Leaving the Commonwealth begins to lag, the Helix pick it up and keep it moving, like any good bar band should. Hans Chew's piano sounds like a gremlin in the works, constantly taunting the frontman, while Steven McGuirl's drums keep everything moving at a quick clip. The Helix proves as diverse as it is agile, moving from the straightforward honkytonk opener "Razorbacked" to the zydeco-inflected "Le Grand Cochon" to the more psychedelic moments on "Freddie's Lapels". The closing title track is a dense, sharp-cornered guitar jam that, much like "Ando-Yeap" on Arghiledes, takes the album in a completely new direction right before it ends. Both are intriguing, even exciting finales, which suggest that Speer is at his best when he's working not within specific historical frameworks, but between them.
