In the museums of the distant future, America will be reduced to an animatronic Wild West saloon, with the Pinetop Seven's Bringing Home the Last Great Strike stuck on a perpetual loop. We'll be nothing but a kickline, a poker game, and a roomful of hard luck stories. Everything will be dusty. The anachronisms will be lost on our descendents. We'll have been an empire of cowboys. It's not such a bad obituary.
Bringing Home the Last Great Strike would definitely not count as insurgent country; there isn't a punk bone in its body. It's an incredible line-up of bruised and tired music where folk, bluegrass, Louisville post-rock, Eastern music and electronics all drink side by side. As pristine and complex as the arrangements sound, the album's been kicked around and beaten up. Brimming with unglamorous stories of circus freaks, drifters, stranglers, ghosts, and drunks, Pinetop Seven have crafted a rich, melancholy work of music for the unemployable.
And vocalist/lyricist/multi-instrumentalist Darren Richard seems to play barkeep to the whole lot of them, telling their stories as if he'd eavesdropped on them, sometimes even assuming the voice of their own confessionals. The record store guy warned me about the vocals: too white, too nasally, too haunted, he said. But in truth, I've come to adore them; a dire, warbling falsetto somewhere between Jeff Magnum, Jeff Buckley and Jeremy Enigk. The bizarre instrumentation and languid arrangements lend the music an almost timeless quality, drawing you in while the searching vocals repel. You may come to love them as I have but many will be discouraged. After all, they're quite white, nasally, and irremediably haunted. Fair warning, in any case.
The introductory fanfare, "As the Mutiny Sleeps," is a somber homage to the Band's "Theme from the Last Waltz," twittering with bells and glockenspiel while a muted trumpet whimpers and dour clarinet calls the album's plodding approach. "On the Last Ride In" is a lazy, twanging tale of departure. The drifter's regret is a familiar theme, but Richard's evocative lyrics lend color and depth to the sketch: "From under the clouds/ His father's face/ Promising rain, rain, rain/ And all sides came crashing down." One of the more traditionally instrumented tracks on The Last Great Strike, the acoustic strum melds with the soft Fender Rhodes, upright bass and distant violin. "An empty trunk no longer full of all that trust," Darren intones as the music recedes.
"A Black Eye to Be Proud Of" is one of the record's standouts; emerging from electronic loops, fat vaudeville piano stomps out the melody. Darren Richard assumes the first-person narrative of a young man who's fallen in love with a whore: "But Leah, I think that could change/ I've got money for you to teach me." The narrator is a boy compared to the brothel's other clientele: "My own black eye to be proud of never came/ I'm a coward still the same/ Skinny arms and watery eyes." The Pinetop Seven have cited director Jim Jarmusch as an influence, and in "Black Eye," that influence becomes apparent, rewriting the conventions of the unrequited love song with humor and subtle sadness.
"Ten Thousand to Carlisle Came" opens with an alarum of Middle Eastern horns and proceeds into a profoundly disturbing country-western ballad about a deaf-mute girl that's become a roadside attraction: "To spite us in car loads/ They came to see this sadness displayed." The song's final verse is particularly horrific, but sung with the slight distance of the greatest storytellers: "Cut the lights off/ Pull the car close/ Let the gasoline run/ Beneath the locked door/ Throw the match down/ Let her sleep."
"At His Kitchen Table" executes a rustbelt tribute to Slint's "Breadcrumb Trail"; a dead, insistent guitar-lick, the blank spoken-word narrative. Vibes punctuate the monologue as a maelstrom of howling electronics blows beneath. The bored observational candor is pure Brian McMahan as Richard intones: "A sound outside finally caught his attention and he looked out the window across the street to where a young mother was yelling. She was yelling at her little boy who had found a dead bird and brought it into the house." The narrative goes exactly nowhere.
Wheezing Keen-O-Tone keyboards and skillet percussions mark the final song with a vocal track, "A Friend to the Minnesota Strangler," a sketch of the relationship between a fugitive serial killer and the bird he "kept in a hat box by his bed." Richard plucks the nylon guitar strings like plucking on the nerves themselves in pointed, rhythmic pops. "The Minnesota Strangler" fades into the final track, "Buried in St. Cloud," a funereal procession of bass clarinet, flugelhorn, accordion and cello winding all stories down to their inevitable conclusions.
Bringing Home the Last Great Strike is unique in trafficking so liberally in human misery without ever approaching angst. Richard deftly avoids every inclination to wallow in his characters' misfortunes as a cipher for his own, while also never deriving the kind of morbid thrill in the rustic bizarre like a certain sister-/mountain-fucking Kentuckian whose music is often strikingly parallel. The Last Great Strike is a jukebox anthology of American unhappiness. All its nostalgia seems directed toward a more miserable time. This, in the end, seems to be the West worth remembering.
