:: Track Listing

1. Not a Heel
2. Aw Come Aw Wry #5
3. Joe Tex, These Taming Blues
4. Aw Come Aw Wry #6
5. I Am a Full Grown Man (I Will Lay in the Grass All Day)
6. Dead Heart
7. Aw Come Aw Wry #3
8. South (Of America)
9. Lost Name
10. Endless pt. 1
11. Endless pt. 2
12. Nowhere Road, Georgia, Feb. 21, 2005

:: Record Review

Phosphorescent

Aw Come Aw Wry
(Misra; 2005)

Rating: 74%
Combined Rating: 73%


Like love, this review is doomed. Like regret, we begin with the worst. So: “Nowhere Road, Georgia, Feb. 21, 2005” is almost 19 minutes of empty “sound” punctuated by slight rainstorm drawl. However Matthew Houck wanted to end his delicate suite, he played the wrong card. The track isn’t an indulgence in white noise, it’s simply inaudible, cousin. “Nowhere Road” can’t be boring because it’s practically nonexistent, and while logically named and logically placed at the tired rattlesnake tail of an album swamped in unrequited, obtuse love/faith/anything, sentiment and moody symmetry don’t do much to actually justify the thing. That interruptive thing. The thing that sucks this album dry.

Because up until track 12, Phosphorescent’s sophomore gleam is a tidy suite on which to hang one’s gothic twang, a song cycle based on, for the most part, a horn section, an excellent Aw Come Aw Wry Choir, and Houck’s unplugged Cobain-taught-Bonnie brittle. Seaweed wreathed around the #s of the record’s titular hillbilly lament, the horns, harmonicas, pump organs, elemental guitars, ukuleles and all manner of pranging kitchen beats splay patiently from the “Aw Come Aw Wry” hubs. And there is the tripod, #three, #five, and #six stamped out of what musta been a drunken midnight reverie, each altering a basic four or five note strain—sped up, wound down, soused with horns or reeling under a cloud of whiskied aphids—in order to cap one song or introduce another. The whole becomes a thatched portrait of embarrassingly open heartache: Aw Come Aw Wry is only challenging in its searing pace, otherwise expansively flowing and subtly gorgeous on top of simple means.

There’s a lot of charm in Houck’s politeness and humility. He’s produced the album into chunks, the mix an opaque froth of gospel and folk inside wooden ice cube trays. Shall we dredge up clichés—together? This is a headphone album; Houck is tin up front, the bass hangs from your lobes, and the choir crawls up the back of your brain tissue. “Dead Heart” is the truth, the only song inside a big growler of campfire brew to build to a shaking and definite climax. It doesn’t have the horns, though, the horns that pound against the walls of your sinuses, all the walls, all the time. These horns, winded by M. Nicolas Cervini, Brent Jones, and David Nelson, these horns make “Joe Tex, These Taming Blues” into a fevered Dixieland phantasm, channeling the soul Legend by reeling against the cathartic illusions southern “blues” can provide. Houck gets to screaming, “I mean we’ve come upon a bunch of rabies/ And there isn’t nothing all us little animals can do.” The horns and Houck get’ta screaming together, “With all five kinds of reins and all nine kinds of thunderings,/ Or eighteen white horses if won’t none of them come to me.” The horns even bother to take up Houck’s slack, booming where his lyrics could never boom in “Not a Heel” or pushing the train whistle guitar in “I Am a Full Grown Man” to act like it’s got some melody. The songwriter here is usually willing to offend the audience before he offends his instruments, that’s how his humility works. But the way he steps back for giant blats, you get the sense that he’s actually scared of the things. Doesn’t want to get hurt by the horns.

It starts with the title. Aw Come Aw Wry has a bent ferocity in wit alone, sounding like a piece of another time or of a misunderstood locale. Then there’s Houck’s irritating insistence on the lyrically kooky, like in “Joe Tex” where he tweets, “Am I really really really really gonna haveta really gonna haveta really haveta leave town?” before some Jim O’Rourke noodling. Or, in “Lost Name” when he reasons, “If I lost my name,/ I would not feel bad./ Because I lost my name/ And I don’t feel bad.” And, “Take my feet to the bar/ Where I know you at not are.” From “Endless pt. 1.” Does the phrase that crowns this album, along with John Neff’s pedal steel and Houck’s peasant pity persona, balance out stuff like “at not are?” Make it work? There’s rebellion in them hills, old plaintive dogmas gripping the souls of modern men.

Really, it doesn’t matter. Aw Come Aw Wry’s lyrics and thematic consistency are pretty easy to reckon, moot babies outside Houck’s chirrup or the whole album’s melancholy. Phosphorescent’s just done something accessible and accomplished. Chop off the last track and this shit here’s catholic. Dom Sinacola :: 2 February 2006 |