HBE Presents: Rev Deadeye’s No Man Gospel Band, Michael Tarbox
Saturday June 12th, 2010
Hillgrass Bluebilly Presents:
Rev Deadeye’s No Man Gospel Band
Michael Tarbox
Tom McSod
10PM
$4
The Reverend Deadeye is the Reverend’s son of a Reverend’s son. He spent his youth handlin’ snakes and performin’ at tent revivals alongside his Pentecostal family on the Navajo reservation in Arizona. This sacred musical heritage finds its way prominently into his performances. But don’t expect a Sunday mornin’ church service; instead, expect a Saturday night baptism with fire holy rollin’ revival. With his modified wok-lid resonator guitar, homemade beer can microphone, kick drum, and washtub snare, he delivers a punk-rock version of gritty pre-war delta blues which he blends with fiery gospel interpretations capable of turnin’ the whole room into a spirit filled bar room revival.
Michael Tarbox leads The Tarbox Ramblers, best known for a rough-hewn sound drawing equally from American gothic, Appalachian and paleo-blues traditions. But with “My Primitive Joy,” his solo debut, the music’s begun to change.
Recorded this spring in a converted pharmacy on the outskirts of Nashville, “My Primitive Joy” bypasses the Ramblers’ backwoods squall entirely. Instead, Tarbox submits an ambitious set of performances centering on acoustic songs – many of them brief – with understated melodies and spare arrangements. The album’s inspirations include folk music, rock, pop and – further afield – art song and even elegy. With its smattering of piano, trumpet, pedal steel, it’s a far cry from what we’ve come to expect from Tarbox and his group.
Or is it? Asked to address the question over lunch in Cambridge, Tarbox laughed and said he sees only continuity between his older and newer work: “You can reshuffle the deck, but the cards don’t change. The new songs are just as much a result of my influences as anything else I’ve recorded. The form they take is less important than their spirit.”
He has a point. The fatalism of the old songs Tarbox loves is everywhere on “My Primitive Joy.” Hopes and attachments are fraught, and when Tarbox sings “this world and all its danger soon may fall away” it’s tough to say whether he sees respite or calamity coming his way. But if his outlook’s provisional, many of these songs still point to renewal, romantic and otherwise. The world’s a contest of love and time but – for now – the former seems to prevail.
Standouts cuts include the title track, a gorgeous tangle of pedal steel that gains the world by letting it go, the coming-of-age tale Have You Been To The City? and the dream realms of At Dusk. Elsewhere, the sunniness of Whose Fault But Mine? belies its story of apprehension and revelation. Tarbox’s expressive singing and vivid lyrics are front and center here, and spacious production gives the listener plenty of room to engage them. Which is a good thing because, heading into uncharted waters, “My Primitive Joy” is his best work yet.
