D Charles Speer & The Helix: Distillation

For people who already love Speer and the Helix, click here to skip to the meat and potatoes, or here for dessert. This one is very good, maybe not quite as good as After Hours, but that’s an all time stunner in my book and this hits a birdie on the cosmic country dog-leg ninth that these boys sculpted on my back lawn. WTF with the golf reference? There’s lesbians and ravens to come, so sit back Country fans…

The older I get, the more I feel myself settling into a comfortable fantasy. It’s a mix up, a distillation of naïve sarcasm, honest to goodness enthusiasm with flashes of direct correlation. It might be what Don Juan called controlled folly, but I’m not sure I’m qualified to say…

I grew up in rural North Cornwall, near Bodmin Moor. At nine years old, just before we left that corner of the county for another, I remember recognising a Confederate flag that was hanging from the fence posts of a post war prefab, opposite a ramshackle independent garage just down the road from my school. I imagine the garage isn’t there any longer, but there’s a slim chance it is. It’s not the Cornwall other people like to see, but it’s the one I love. People fixing their own shit with what they can find, hog roasts, loose attitudes regarding the law, unstable attitudes regarding bureaucracy and more than a handful of lorry/bike fetishists. It’s a future that’s looming over me, and I can’t say I’m one to fight destiny. 

My mother had lived in Canada in her twenties, consequently childhood holiday drives usually featured the John Denver greatest hits tape. My father was an Anglican priest. In the early nineties he blessed a pair of lesbians (at their request) who wanted some kind of religious interaction in their relationship. He’d asked them not to make a hullabaloo about it, but they got dressed up as bride and groom and invited the press anyway. A few days later we had a rock put through our living room window, with a pair of ravens tied to it (dead ravens, thankfully). I don’t reckon that was a thank you.

There were a lot of evangelists up there. In a country as densely populated as this, it’s a considerably far out corner, comparable to North Wales in some ways… Spend a little time in the local charity shops and you’ll find more than your usual ratio of records adorned with questionable boots, pedal steel and handlebar moustaches. There’s a kindred spirit here. A lot of Cornish miners went out to labour the American gold rushes of the nineteenth century; they might not have come back, but something did.

So what I’m getting at is this. Half of my friends live in caravans, my biggest purchase this year was a powerful air-rifle and I’m slowly easing my way into Western shirts, avoiding flamboyant embroidery for the time being. Don’t fret, the confessional will be over soon. I’m just telling you that I like Country music more by the day and despite my English blood it seems to be seeping into the way I look at things.

When I tell people this in response to the musical taste question it’s either a full stop or a stick of dynamite ‘neath the floodgates of friendship. But there’s a lot of Country out there and I can see why people don’t get switched on. People don’t instantly think your talking about Wooden Wand, if they know any contemporary country it’s more likely to be Miranda Lambert (coincidentally a source of inspiration to the aforementioned Wand), or Taylor Swift. Strange, people here don’t seem to know Jimmy Buffet, despite the fact that in the States he has 8 Gold and 9 Platinum albums.

No, what I’m talking about is the Country music that Country music fans don’t like, or are at least suspicious of; Old Country for No-Men. I don’t know a great deal about the Alt-Country of the eighties and nineties and I’m not a big fan of the Lambchop I have heard so far, but I am a fan of this. I just recently saw Jack Rose & The Black Twig Pickers (record reviewed here) play a pair of sets of almost traditional Virginian folk music, after the show I asked Mike Gangloff (banjo and fiddle player) what his trad-folk contemporaries think of his background in improv-drone group Pelt. He told me that they either don’t ask him, don’t know, or dismiss it as his “weird phase”.

Jack Rose, who also cut his teeth with Pelt, has followed a similar trajectory within his solo career. Compare Red Horse, White Mule with Dr Ragtime and his Pals, there has been a consistent dance towards roots. Wooden Wand and Hush Arbors are further examples of musicians who went to lick the cosmos at the perimeter of their world and found that the cosmos took a liking to them, following them home as they delved further into the dirt at their feet. Sunburned haven’t come back yet, but they’re still at home. Dave Shuford, the voice and pen behind D. Charles Speer is another scoundrel on this journey to the west through the east from the west. He and members of his band the Helix have been long-term members of the No Neck Blues Band, often referred to as NNCK or “weird improvised psyche shit from New York”.

And for the past few years he has been gathering speed as a fine songwriter, releasing a much lauded solo record I’ve yet to get my hands on (Some Forgotten Country) and last years After Hours which made my top ten list for 2008. This record, entitled Distillation and released by the people at Three Lobed Recordings, follows in the vein that After Hours carved into the mountain side. But this one is playing itself out further down the stream, meandering at a lower altitude on smoother slopes.

Not that it’s without its rapids and it’s burst dams. There’s the Greek inflected carnival shuffle of instrumental The Fallika Stair and the up-to-strange-good pair Life Insurance and Gravedigger, both whipping around like the air boat I wish I had (geographical inconsistency noted motherstickers, it’s my fantasy world!). They’re probably my two favourites right now, and both take shelter halfway through their course. On Life Insurance the fine pianna and the bass player’s bulbous notes carve out a strange alcove for Hans Chew's Stonesy vocal cameo to get all reverbed and philosophical in (“what you spend is what you leave behind”). Complete that with Street Legal gospel singers and you’ve got yourself one digi-promo’d journo heading to paypal for some black wax.

It’s not that this record is less exciting than After Hours, it just doesn’t have the same peculiar energy, the nitrous. It’s not as prone to taking sudden turns in the dark (the bozouki dirge wig-out, the hymn) and doesn’t quite have something to match Fossilized, a song with the most incredibly psychedelic slide lick I have yet heard. Psychedelic slide lick, there’s a phrase. But these ten songs come close, and will endure as far if not further.

Considering their obvious ability and affinity for jaunty drunkhouse ballads they’ve done well to save it all up for the hazy logic’d entreaties of Hardwood Floors. Shuford’s raised eyebrow delivery recalls Dylan on Nashville Skyline, particularly on the piano frilled chorus,

“All he wants to do is go home, rip off all your clothes.

"Something I’ve been known to do, once of twice before”

In case you haven’t caught the drift, this is a band we’re talking about. Upright piano, electric bass, bronze strings, Fender worship, Hawaiian Blue slide guitar, plaintive twang harmonies accompanying Shuford’s foundation fondling baritone and clear propulsive shuffles emanating from the drums. It’s all fondly recorded with character, a deep cut in the Black Dirt studios. Elderflower is both the warmest breeze and sparsest sound on Distillation. Shuford’s intending to “agonize no more”, entreating us to “seek our peace with the liquid gold” over a beautiful sounding acoustic guitar which entwines arms and slow dances with the footloose lyricism of the mandolin.

It’s been easy to emphasise the fun and frolics in such music, (the strung out finale that is Shorty (A Bastard Cat) driving both the message and you right home) but the lyrical content of any Speer record contains the kind of mental compost that’s fertile ground for any mind’s imagination and the seeking eye to boot. His observations are keen, and there’s no wallowing ego to wade through in order to get at them.

While looking for an ancient boundary on album opener ‘Mason Dixon Crime’ he places youngsters in the maw of what might well be Edgar Allan Poe’s raven. The second track Open Season continues Distillation’s slow wake vibe from dawn to sunrise, taking stock of some industrialised Southern sprawl from an overpass perhaps. Shuford sees the debt collectors taking “your family while you sleep, simply raking in the dough”.

It’s strange that so many people dismiss Country music, but in the same way that Sunn0))) have provided a route for many into metal, and metal into many, it seems like it takes an outsider to smash a hole in a genre’s façade and show us that although the wider family have gotten a little big for their boots there’s a lot of beauty in their shadow, and perhaps within them too. I didn’t need Speer and the Helix to prove the depth of musicality, emotion and good times that the style can synthesise into something remarkably appealing to the ear, but I’m grateful to them. For those interested in reading a little more about the band, there’s an excellent feature published by Village Voice here.

If any of you boys (and, err, girls?) feel like using the comments forum below to start an informal petition demanding they tour the UK (in an airboat), please feel free…