Review Summary: When your trouble comes knockin' I hope you ain't there.
Timber Timbre frontman Taylor Kirk sings from the following perspectives on their self-titled third album: a dead guy buried in a shallow grave that falls in love with a woman who trips over him; a remorseful felon facing execution by electric chair; someone who was once King but “the next minute, nothin’”, fantastizing about returning to dust; a man who crashes his car into a tree after frantically driving away from some undisclosed evil, a sword in his trunk.
Similarly to their first two home-recorded albums, something deathly lurks around every corner, and half the time it feels like the doomed souls in Kirk’s tales don’t even care; they might even welcome it. On 2005’s
Cedar Shakes and 2007’s
Medicinals, Kirk yelped and quivered about werewolves, vampirism, disease and Satan over harshly strummed acoustic guitars, clanking banjos and kitchenware percussion. They sounded a little like someone’s desperate last will and testament recorded in the early morning as they unraveled in a haunted house.
Timber Timbre continues along those lines, but the studio production casts away the lo-fi cobwebs from their previous work, revealing songs that are even grimmer and more devious, as well as a few of their sweetest ballads.
Mostly, Timber Timbre go all-in with their swampy take on indie-blues (if such a thing even actually exists), filling out the eerily spacious mix with croaking organs, strings that float in like apparitions, and percussion that sounds like subtle noise from the next room. The band approaches the genre with dark finesse: “Until the Night Over” coasts on a bewitching auto harp melody that collapses into an impassioned chorus. “Trouble Comes Knocking” has guitars so weighed down by the sludgy pace that they can hardly break above a single note until the song opens up into an exuberant coda that brings the song into another level, a future Timber Timbre hallmark shown in nascent form. It’s not always captivating—while the album is well-sequenced to alleviate potential monotony in their electric material, decent songs like “Magic Arrow” and “I Get Low” can easily get lost among the shuffle, representing a point where Timber Timbre might sound a little too comfortable within their uniquely macabre aesthetic.
Still, the album is at its best when wallowing in that balmy murk. It’s hard to fault the very pretty acoustic songs that bookend the album when their greatest flaw is being too musically pleasant. But aside from some characteristically compelling lyrics (“Not born of men but some bog-mother moon, one of us is not normal and it might not be you”, Kirk ruminates on "No Bold Villain"), these songs lack much of the personality that imbues their knottier, more dissonant blues material and venture into slightly twee territory, Kirk getting carried away with folksy intonations. Again, these are both lovely songs, but perhaps the quirkiness of the rest of the record push these songs toward old-fashioned folk pastiche by comparison. We’ll Find Out” is a more fitting take on soft wistfulness: it begins with quietly thumping bass and organ, then a small choir and violins enter, the amassing arrangement feeling like it's cornering the narrator in the basement they’re hiding in.
Regardless of some stagnant moments,
Timber Timbre is a strong, beguiling document of creepy blues and wistful balladry. It feels like something of a throat-clearing for the band, a re-announcement after their first two apocalyptic (and now hard to find) records, The album sees them refining the compelling horror-folk previously shown and expanding into deeper and darker waters, while also boasting stronger songwriting and attractive glimpses at a more melodic, less possessed style. Timber Timbre beat the odds and survived the long, dark, humid night; it sounds like they feel pretty alright about it. I think.
3.7
