Just don’t laugh horribly at my attempt here.
Murder by Death
Imagine yourself as a saloon. This maybe a stretch, but I have faith in you. You are old, dilapidated and abandoned. In your memories is a vast store of woe, triumph, love, and loss. Songs of mines, the devil, murder and crime spin around your attack. Under your small shabby roof events have unfolded, both fabulous and mundane. Your feelings are tied to every soul that has walked through your doors, every sin of theirs became your own. This is what its like to listen to a band out of Indiana. Murder by Death is no light hearted listener’s band. They are for musical polymaths who take great delectation in something new and different. MBD has a sound that almost indefinable and nonpareil. My best shot would be to say that on their latest album “In Bocca Al Lupo” you find stories and songs that are chillingly beautiful.
This up and coming band who opened recently for Reverend Horton Heat, which is how I came across them, is almost surreal. Their deep, heavy music takes hold of your mind and pulls you along the ebb and flow of it’s moods and stories. Every song is steeped in visualizations. Rich vocals are supplied by Adam Turla. Sweet like honey, and flavored with something that can only be called Johnny Cash-esque Turla paints stories that so remind me of Nick Cave and P J Harvey and yet he makes the style is very own.
The eerie but robust beats offered up by percussionist Dagan Thogerson and smooth liquid notes from bassist Matt Armstrong provide an excellent compliment to the insanely talented Turla who leads not only with his raw honey vocals, but his wicked guitar riffs and smooth melody’s.
The depth of MBD is added to by their cellist Sarah Balliet, who is amazing on the album, but is almost unbearably magnificent at a live show. Not over done, but like smooth velvet she binds the stories that they weave, tying the ends together with some piano, thusly giving the quartet their 5th and final dimension.
As the Album winds down, the dreams that MBD has filled your consciousness with dance away from the saloon and along the river, haunted by drowned sailors, who watch the gypsy girls dance into the night.
