Reviews
Alistair Christl
Unmarked Grave
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Add to del.ico.us.Review Date: 2007-11-24
Sometimes I get the feeling I’m typecast here. I’m not complaining; there’s just a string of coincidences I’ve noticed since I started reviewing. Like a few weeks ago, I was at Clinton’s. I had just finished shooting-up some common household cleaning products and bits of a broken bourbon bottle, [had to be the tear duct since my parole officer will totally freak if she finds any more rabbit tracks], when I ran into Dan. We had both come to watch The Stables, and Dan knew I was a fan so he brought some new discs he wanted me to review.
I immediately gravitated towards Alistair Christl because of the album art, and because he looked like the kind of guy who might inject Borax and bottle into his tear duct. Someone I could relate to.
Christl, like The Stables [formerly the Kent Boys], is exhuming sound from another time and place. You see, just after recording his final single “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive”, Hank Williams left his Knoxville hotel room in a chauffer driven car. He cooked himself up some heroin for the ride, but he went a little further than he intended. The poor kid driving him found him dead in the back of the car, next to the lyrics for his unrecorded “Then Came That Fateful Day.” That’s basically how legends are made, friends, and people like Christl take it upon themselves to grant folks like Hank eternal life.
Of course Christl is channelling a lot of Elvis as well. He’s got The King’s do, and jerky rock vibrato, plus the tight-waisted blazer with the gigantic shoulder pads. But there’s enough’s been said about Elvis to date; and to be honest I never really understood what the big deal was. “The King”… feh. Big deal. I’m way more intrigued by the Hank Williams influence on Unmarked Grave. Because Williams could really perform. Elvis would sing a sad song, and that’s fine. Williams would sing a song, sadly. That’s a big difference. Christl really taps into the performative quality Williams was master of. And that sorta gives him licence to dig up this discarded compositional form, trick it out in modernity, and take it to the show.
There are some high-octane rockabilly numbers which I can really get into. Like I said, I’m typecast, I love this oldschool re-imagining. The title track, the first on the album, opens with a kind of fucked-up zombie Scott Joplin piano, that stumbles its way throughout the track blending in and out of some heavy electric guitar riffs and a freewheeling electric organ a la The Band – to whom, longtime readers know, I regularly sacrifice transients out of respect. The lyrics are catchy and dark, and rife with the imagery of the old honky tonk scene. “Take the pennies from my eyes. Throw me in an unmarked grave.” Maybe a little gloomy for the Grand Old Opry, but Christl is merely pushing the envelop on ideas that were always just underneath the surface of those slanted okie grins. And being and independent artist from Canada, in 2007, Christl doesn’t have the same restrictions Williams’ marketeers imposed.
I don’t continue to refer to Hank because I’m a fan. I appreciate what he did for music, and I respect him as a performer. But there are some unlistenable aspects of his work that Christl recycles as well. The yodeling, man. The yodeling. I can’t stand it. Also – while the modern production is a great improvement on the rockabilly motif – the rhythm section is fairly creatively restricted in the name of recreating a genre. I like a little bit of country and a lot of rock and roll; but tear in my beer ballads like “Never got her Number” and “Ship at Sea” are only saved in my books by the Tom Waits worthy electric gee tar Christl toys around with. Songs like “Fool of me” and the Chuck Berry cover “Maybelline” make for some tasty listening, and these are the tracks I continue to return to. They’re a lot of fun, and surprisingly transportative. Quentin Tarantino should really give Christl a try.
But the best track in my books, [the reason I continue to prelect about Hank Williams], is Christl’s cover of Williams’ “Ramblin Man”. It’s a heavy, overheated track foreboding doom. The arrangement greatly exaggerates the “I gotta be me” country staple theme of the song, but it works. There’s a pervasive soap opera organ, and a slinky slow tempo bass. Just a little banjo and fiddle shrewdly woven into the mix. And Christl’ abandons the Elvis pastiche for a much more effective Williams impression. But it’s more than just an impression, I should say that he really runs with the idea of Williams’ painful yodel-turned-howl, and the song becomes an extremely powerful elegy for something undistinguishable, but valuable… and lost. This is where the country/blues fusion really works: when it taps into something very real and profound. When a song is more than just a series of stylistic choices. When it’s a psychosis.
Real, raw emotion is generally lacking in contemporary music. Maybe that’s not fair. I mean to say the majority of marketable music has always lacked emotion, throughout history, because it comes out of a need to produce – rather than the insatiable need to express one’s self. I think that’s why I see so many up-and-coming independent musicians gravedigging through our musical past to find those old legends. People who made music as means to alleviate an overpowering need. Be it to cry, to kick ass, or to fuck a bunch of randoms. If I’m being typecast as the kind of guy who respects an artist with musical insight rooted in rock history, [as Christl is], I really can’t complain. I don’t compare these people to the legends they emulate, because they haven’t become legendary themselves… yet. But you can bet that your heroes, whoever they are, had heroes too. Hank Williams wanted to be Roy Acuff, and Christl wants to be Hank Williams. I wonder who’ll want to be Christl some day.
Score: 7.3
- Glyn Bowerman