Monday, July 15, 2013

The Open Road: A Review of Daughn Gibson's "Me Moan"


A fixation of the open road is nothing new to indie rock. The 90's had Modest Mouse, with albums such as This Is a Long Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About and The Lonesome Crowded West. The latter featured a 10 minute long song called "Trucker Atlas" which was about, well, a trucker's atlas. Through the lens of Isaac Brock's dark worldview we got a view of a darker, crumbling America. Deserts rivaled by shopping malls. 

Even the 2000's have had artists who use the road as an inspiration. In 2011, The War On Drugs made the great Slave Ambient, a record which successfully blended rootsy-Americana with shoegaze. And even this year, Dirty Beaches released the brilliant Drifters/Love Is the Devil a record in which the main protagonist was wandering the world, a man without a home (from Berlin to the Danube River).

It seems logical to put Daughn Gibson's excellent new record, Me Moan in the ranks of these records. After all, Gibson was a trucker for a decade, trekking across America with an 18-wheeler. So compared to Dirty Beaches, Gibson works on a much smaller scale. The characters who populate Gibson's songs aren't lost, wandering strange European cities at night. They're meeting each other in roadside motel rooms, getting drinks at the Rio Bar and Grill or saying goodbye to Lynn Falls.

Daughn Gibson himself may seem just like a character as well. He's handsome enough to be an Ambercombie & Fitch model, yet he's driven a truck while playing in the stoner metal band Pearls and Brass. He's currently residing in Pennsylvania where his best friend lives. His best friend happens to be Matt Korvette of sludge punkers Pissed Jeans. Oh yeah, and his real name's not Daughn Gibson.

But when he released his 2012 debut, All Hell it became clear that Gibson was a musician worth watching. It was a record that was largely sample based, but with Gibson singing in his (now) signature baritone which recalls Johnny Cash, Tom Waits and Scott Walker. He proved to be an adept story teller as well. A perfect example of that is "Tiffany Lou", about a daughter who keeps seeing her father getting arrested on the TV show "Cops".

Because of the uniqueness of All Hell, but also because of it's short length (only half an hour), it wouldn't be surprising to be thinking hard of what Gibson would do next. Not to mention that he was signed to indie behemoth Sub Pop. So the questions were raised. What would Gibson do with a higher studio budget? What would he do with an actual backing band?
Daughn Gibson's Me Moan

When it comes down to it, the only logical answer is that he would make Me Moan. With his higher studio budget he's been able to feature more instruments (ranging from trombone to cello) and invite distinguished musicians to play with him (John Baizley of Baroness, Jim Elkington of Brokeback). He hasn't lost his style of forming samples, electronic and country music into one blurry, but satisfying whole.

This subtle change of pace is perfectly exemplified on the album's first song (coincidentally the first single as well), "The Sound of Law". The bass sounds funky, and the guitars and drums chug along, just like a truck. Gibson chronicles his birth, which, according to him was on the side of a highway. He also paints a dark picture of his "father", who just doesn't kill a man, but "[blows] that fucker off to hell". What makes this line so shocking and maybe even heart breaking, is that it follows the lyric, "he laid a kiss in my little hand".

A handful of songs are still sample driven, just like Gibson's earlier work. "Mad Ocean" samples militaristic bagpipes rivaled by driving drums. The disembodied vocal samples of "You Don't Fade" sound like the beginning of a Clams Casino beat, and the tick tocking of the drum machine of "The Right Signs" sounds like Chromatics' "A Matter of Time".

But where Gibson really shines are on the tracks that feature more daring and live instrumentation. These songs just happen to be the ones with the best lyrics as well. "Won't You Climb" features swooping violins and choir vocals as Gibson recalls a teenage love in his boring town. "Kissin on the Blacktop" starts off sounding like a joke with it's twangy, honky tonk guitars before Gibson reveals the adventures he's had in the Rio Bar and Grill. He's been ditched in the parking lot by his grandfather and did a little something with a female patron in the restroom.

Much of the lyrical content falls back to doomed relationships on Me Moan. Gibson and his girlfriend recall Bobby and Helen of James Mills' novel, The Panic in Needle Park on "The Pisgee Nest". They steal money from parked cars to pay rent. But she just happens to be the sheriff's daughter and a prostitute. On the album's excellent closer, "Into the Sea", Gibson succumbs to the bottle after a relationship ended the night before ("I don't want to drink the day away / but it's so unfair the way it went last night"). He discloses this all to us over shimmering piano arpeggios.

But it's the album's centerpiece, "Franco", that really hits you straight in the gut. Instrumentally wise, it's sparse. A lone guitar strikes some piercing notes and sometimes they're assisted by a drum beat and piano. On "Franco", Gibson knows the relationship's over, but he's trying to come up with different ways to preserve it. "You and  I can say goodbye to Lynn Falls / a better view of the city life / we could make it a paradise" is one of the many pleading lines that Gibson offers. He says he'll try to take a job and he'll wait for her even though "time can only bend". But the emotional climax is when Gibson sings the line "I wish we had a kid / who never wanted to die".

When it comes down to it, the characters in Daughn Gibson's songs aren't like characters found throughout the ages of rock music, but more literary characters. The characters of "Phantom Rider" who are hiding in hotel rooms with the doors locked recalls the paranoia and violence of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. Gibson's Nick Shay of Don DeLilo's Underworld speeding down a desert road, only to encounter a former lover. On the mundane life studying "All My Days Off", he's the drug addled characters of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son, roaming the small towns in which they live in. Daughn Gibson is all of these compelling characters, but he remains his own as well. And he's just as compelling.

Daughn Gibson - Me Moan
9/10
Recommended Tracks - "The Sound of Law", "The Pisgee Nest", "You Don't Fade", "Franco", "Won't You Climb", "All My Days Off", "Into the Sea"

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