If I were going to sum up the sound of John Beckmann’s Mortal Prophets in one short soundbite, which is sorta my job anyway, I would say that it is what happens when Americana realises that such a term is just a journalistic label and not a physical restraint and proceeds to run roughshod across the musical landscape, just because it can. And that landscape is one made up of genre and geography, style and era…and every other musical dimension and sonic axis besides.
Sure, at the heart of this new six-song salvo, Sleeping In My Bed is a bed of ancient blues sounds and country-fried rock licks, but that is just a platform, a springboard to enable the music to reach those distant sonic shores that it needs to blur the lines of sonic demarcation.
And blur them it does. There are Cohen-esque murder ballads, such as the opener, “Bury Them Deep”, and there are Waitsian drawls, such as the meandering madness of the title track and also the appropriately named avant-garde-gothic-jazz piece “Tom Waits in Drag.”
“Hell or High Water” is an apocalyptic blues number turned lounge jazz croon, and “Cut You Down” almost encroaches on David Bowie’s less easily accessible Berlin years.
It’s an intriguing album, one that wanders a somewhat singular path. If it does have any travelling companions, the only one that I would add to those mentioned above would be Saint Nick (Cave) himself, in turn a modern day shaman-troubadour conjuring up the spirit of the likes of Robert Johnson and Son House. And as sonic renegades go, that is a pretty impressive bunch of musical minions to have, indeed.
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