Despite that bit of surprising news, most of the recent garage confections have more than a tangential tie to punk. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it seems repetitious after a bit. Both are aggressive musics and the latter could even be construed as an extension of the former. But tossing in more than a sprinkle of hillbilly influence into the garage mix hasn’t been too popular of late. Of course the garage bust during the early aughties made the entire genre and some of its more expected trappings a cliché that no one wanted to touch.
For whatever reason another resurgence has occurred with Waylon Thornton a part of that. His isn’t a name that’s tossed around alongside all of the newish Bay Area acts, but his modus operandi might fit in there without too much of a problem.
Hailing from the blown out state of Florida, it’d make sense for Thornton to include some spooky, southern tropes in his work. That’s in there, but just as frequently is a hillbilly inspired drawl and stomp absent from a great deal of his peer’s work.
“White Bones,” from Waylon Thornton and the Heavy Hands’ 2009 album Pure Evil sounds as if it was recorded by some miscreant dating to the fifties or so. The band leader’s voice isn’t augmented too much in post production, but there seems to be the slightest hint of echo included, making the song more ghostly than it would have been even as the song’s all strumming and ruminations on the dead sans percussion.
Drumming, as provided by Thornton’s wife Meg, though goes a long way to cementing the frantic pacing and swampy party time atmosphere that Pure Evil attempts to distill in aural terms. Most songs clock in under three minutes with the vast majority of them being less than two. It’s a punky concept of song construction: there’s no use in repeating yourself if you get the point across.
And sometimes there isn’t even a point. “Monster In My Pocket,” the album’s closing track, is a basically an avenue for the duo to unloose some goblins that it’d been toting around. Freeing those demons is an appropriate closing for an album begun with a spoken word piece moving into the noisome depths of punk and low fidelity recordings.
Pure Evil, as the title suggests, isn’t the most beautiful piece of music to be released in the past few years, but serves as an exorcism of sorts. And even if listeners don’t know what’s being excised, it still sounds good – in that awful sorta way.