Like most of the songs on Murder by Death’s seventh studio album, "The Last Thing" follows a character as he tiptoes along the line between life and death. Details are always tantalizingly scant in Adam Turla's lyrics, but the narrator seems to have decided that he would rather embrace darkness and death than burden his loved ones any longer. "I just don’t want to be another chore, some wounded bird to care for," he sings over a manically strummed guitar, a rambling banjo, and a live-wire bass. The song is more about epiphany than action, yet the music is a flurry of commotion: not downbeat but quick-paced, not resigned but unburdened and celebratory. Turla sings excitedly, as though professing love rather than suicide, and Sarah Balliet delivers a cello solo that’s scratchy and energetic, yet also inscrutable. Her playing is almost scolding, perhaps even taunting, as though there is more to the situation than the narrator is telling us.
For fifteen years these two elements—Turla’s husky voice and Balliet’s tectonic cello—have formed the foundation of Murder by Death’s dark country gothic sound, coloring their tales of thwarted lust and grim violence as they fashion a new mythology form the southern Indiana soil. Those two founding members have provided the band’s most distinctive sounds, and their musical conflict—they play against each other as often as they play with each other—has fortified even their weaker material and distinguished them from the hordes of other country-leaning groups that have come and gone in the twenty-first century.
Their early albums, especially Like the Exorcist, but More Breakdancing, possessed a dark humor and raw energy, as though the band had crossed the police tape to record at the actual scene of the crime. As Murder by Death has progressed—as they have shed and gained new members, as they have relocated from Bloomington to Louisville—they have grown bigger in their sound and brasher in their arrangements, incorporating more and more instruments with each album. Big Dark Love bustles with soundtrack keyboards, sequencers that could be held together with rusty barbed wire, and a mandolin that sounds like a jackhammer. Opener "I Shot an Arrow" thrums on a dated drum loop, while "Solitary One" features a horn line that may be playing at gunpoint.
In other words, this is Murder by Death’s most ambitious album to date, yet it is also their least weird, their most crowded, and arguably their most inconsequential. Recorded with co-producer Kevin Ratterman (Flaming Lips, fellow Louisvillains Houndmouth) and mixed by John Congleton (St. Vincent, Angel Olsen), Big Dark Love buffs away the band’s rougher edges, including relegating Balliet’s cello from lead to supporting role. Instead, they resort routinely to dramatic choruses and rousing crescendos, as though trying to persuade us of the bigness and the darkness of these characters’ conflicts. Too often, however, its sound has just the opposite effect: The arrangements distract from the stories rather than bolster them, making it difficult to immerse ourselves in these peculiar worlds.
This is a drier, grayer Americana than we’re used to hearing from Murder by Death, who sound practiced and professional yet less ominous, less commanding. As a result, Turla’s storytelling suffers. Traditionally, he has gravitated toward characters who are arriving at a crossroads that demands bold action or immediate acquiescence, and that indecision has fueled the gothic quality of previous albums. On the title track, however, Turla has trouble convincing us of the magnitude of these crises, even when the song explodes in skyscraper synths and ritualistic drums. It could be a parody of masculine insistence, but it comes off as less goth and more ick. That’s one of two stalker anthems on Big Dark Love, the other being closer "Hunted". Opening with Turla’s voice distorted to sound like it’s emanating through an old Victrola, the song builds predictably to its melodramatic finish—a surefire show-closer on the festival circuit, but an anticlimax on the record. As the band churn up sound and fury, we can hear the strident strains of Balliet’s cello, scribbling suicide notes in the background and lending some gravity to an album that sounds, tragically, weightless.
