Review Summary: The punkgaze to shoecountry pipeline is real.
The punkgaze to shoecountry pipeline is real, and it flows like a river of blood through the valleys of God's country. Americana has been growing like a weed amongst the denim-patched and tattooed youth lately, protruding increasingly from cracks in the pavement as acts like Wednesday and MJ Lenderman fearlessly blend a slacker's wiry edge with steel guitars and a nonchalant twang. Of course, alternative country goes back decades, but it's currently seeing another renaissance inspired by an equal love of both Drive-By Truckers and My Bloody Valentine. Whether this shift in the punk consciousness is the result of blue-collar solidarity in the Bible Belt or just an effort to wrestle the weirdness of anti-establishment music from the hands of Miller Lite and Big Truck, the movement is giving birth to some brilliant contemporary voices and observational wit.
How Could I Be So In Debt? has the silver belt buckle of Asheville, North Carolina strapped boldly across its waist, but the six-piece collective of Tombstone Poetry keeps their inner freak tucked loose behind the leather. Mind you, the first three songs on this album will lull you into a comfort zone before really subverting any expectations, which is not a dig at all, as the opening run also harbors some of their strongest hooks. "The Lord" kicks things off with notes from the pedal steel crying over clean electric strums as lead songwriter Caelan Burris' establishes some of the lyrical themes and a double entendre for the album title, singing,
"Give me a place to express this spiritual debt" with a sweetly disheveled croon. "They Loved You Here" and "Ghosts of Calves" follow suit with some heartfelt indie rock and slow folk with tragic swells of violin, but then the water starts getting murkier. "What the Work is For" interrupts its crunchy, anthemic hooks with that same pedal steel from track one, now wailing ghoulishly as if possessed while the other guitars and bass oscillate with a near-blackened dissonance before jumping back into another punchy verse like nothing happened. “Sometimes You Don't Get A Choice” introduces a saxophone player and a beefy outro of noise-laden chords and screamed vocals, and then the title track hits us out of left field with that mind-boggling death jazz intro and aggressive doom-struck riffing with even more screaming from the background. All of this in the first half of the record.
It doesn't stop there, but you get what I'm saying, right? Tombstone Poetry quite distinctly sets themselves apart from their peers with their willingness to play dirty with influence, never afraid to smear the tablecloth with bits of shoegaze and dissonant punk. The album does lag a bit through its back half, with both "Menace" and "Traction Control" being neither country nor catchy enough to fully grab me, but then the piano and violin flush some vitality back into the closing duo of "Purity" and "Crushing Defeat", with the latter sending the record off on a particularly high note as the song progresses into a wall of outstretched and bitcrushed tones. Every track on this album is at least different and competently executed enough for
How Could I Be So In Debt? to earn its merit as a genre-bending alt-country odyssey. Whether all of these ideas work together or not just depends on how much blood you like in your steak.
