Scheherazade, Freakwater’s eighth album, stands a chance of being the hardest-hitting country album of the year. On this, their first album in more than 10 years, Catherine Irwin and Janet Beveridge Bean gaze deep into the dark, twisted and just plain puzzling aspects of human behavior, write it up in complex poetry, and sing about it in their inimitable slippery harmonies.
Irwin and Bean have been playing and performing as Freakwater since they got together in the late 1980s in Louisville, Kentucky. They’ve recorded mostly on another Chicago indie label, Thrill Jockey, also home to Bean’s other main band, the indie/punk outfit Eleventh Dream Day, for which she drums and sings. Both Bean, who now lives in Chicago, and Irwin have recorded solo projects over the years, and in 2014 Bean and James Elkington recorded a charming album of psychedelic Brit-folk songs under the moniker The Horse’s Ha.
The title of this album Scheherazade is of course a reference to the main character in One Thousand And One Nights, the courtier who had to keep telling tales lest she lose her life. The Freakwater that produced these songs sounds driven to unburden themselves of these dark narratives and to burden us with them, as if to challenge us to do something with them now.
What can you do with a song like the opener “What The People Want”? It’s a murder ballad done the way you might expect from a couple of country musicians with punk leanings. Except, it’s not really a ballad because it tells no story, just the facts. We enter in the midst of the telling, like overhearing a cop muttering the sordid details to another cop, or a reporter, or just himself: “They split that girl from stem to stern … they threw her body down a well … so deep in blood the deed was done, and every one some mother’s son,” the lines punctuated by the puzzled refrain, “whose baby are you …”
The first single from the album is Bean’s “The Asp And The Albatross,” a psychedelic, loping country-rocker with stabbing electric guitar lines and soaring harmonies. The highly symbolic lyrics seem to swirl around and turn back on themselves with their references to two actual but also mythical animals – the asp that’s symbolic of quick death, sometimes by suicide, and the albatross that’s symbolic of the wind, outsider poets, ghosts of dead sailors, and curses laid against those who unwisely sin against Nature.
The second single is Irwin’s “Number One With A Bullet,” a rolling country gospel waltz full of churchy organ vamps and wrenching fiddle and electric guitar solos. The title can be read at least two ways, and the imagery is violently oceanic and packed with roiling emotions: “Tell them how the ocean sounds / and how a man can drown / tied to the tide / till the earth drags you down / ground to the ground / where the sea’s white wings pound.”
And so it goes, the music a blend of hardcore country and the most indie of indie-rock sounds, the lyrics full of literate, dark (often darkly humorous) wordplay. The slow waltz “Bolshevik And Bollweevil” has lovely multi-part harmonies and an arrangement that features woozy pedal steel, the lyrics a chilling conflation of political disaster on a national scale with natural disaster on a personal scale. “Take Me With You” is a lovely lilting country gospel that A.P. Carter would have recognized as springing from his Appalachian homeland, with lines like “Where is the mist that clung to every mountainside / has it fallen back to earth with every tear that we have cried?”
“Down Will Come Baby” uses a twisting of the most familiar lullaby in the world as the starting point for a portentous portrayal of betrayal – perhaps personal, perhaps on a broader scale. The arrangement rises to a fever-pitch of multi-layered electric guitar squall the likes of which I’ve not heard from Freakwater before.
In addition to longtime bassist David Wayne Gay, this iteration of Freakwater includes Morgan Geer (Drunken Prayer) on electric guitar, Anna Krippenstapel on violin and vocals, and Neal Argabright on drums and pump organ. They’re joined by a handful of guests including James Elkington (Eleventh Dream Day, The Horse’s Ha) on pedal steel and mandola; Evan Patterson (Jaye Jayle) with a mighty wah-wah guitar solo on “Down Will Come Baby”; Jonathan Glen Wood on Moog, electric guitar and vocals; Warren Ellis on flute and violin; Sarah Balliet on cello; and Anthony Fossaluzza on keyboards. (Both Drunken Prayer and Jaye Jayle will be touring with Freakwater in support of Scheherazade.)
I’m not going to bother picking a favorite song from Scheherazade. What turned out to be my favorite from their previous album, Thinking Of You is one I didn’t even mention in my review. With songs so replete in musical and lyrical riches, suffice to say they’re all keepers and growers.
Bloodshot, 2016
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