Music
Playing Tuesday, 9th at Mercy Lounge w/Creech Holler
by Jewly Hight
It’s clear from the sight of the melting Confederate flag emblazoned with Abraham Lincoln’s pipe-smoking visage on the cover of Swampblood that the Legendary Shack Shakers aren’t out to preserve some pristine Southern essence. Instead, they seize the senses with a provocative brew of fact and fiction and liberty-taking interpretation.
“It’s Reconstruction and destruction and what’s the difference there—a metaphor for something convoluted like that. It’s just a mind-fuck,” says sinewy frontman Col. J.D. Wilkes of the image he painted after bassist Mark Robertson saw the Abe-Dixie pairing in a U.K. club. “They didn’t understand that that was out of context. They just thought that it was an American-looking thing to throw up [for decoration].”
The word “swampblood”—the title of both the Shack Shakers’ sixth overall album and a swaggering tune laced with blaring, caustic mouth harp—implies an undiluted, alchemistic sludge-and-plasma mixture. Like the legends Wilkes has uncovered and translated into Delta-meets-Appalachia, blues-darkened psychobilly since his return from Nashville to western Kentucky, it’s equal parts viscera and myth. “There are very few folktales from the area that have happy endings,” he says. “That’s where the blood comes in.”
Stacking tall tales onto a foundation of actualities is a mighty potent way of engrossing an audience. “It’s always worked,” says Wilkes. “The shock and awe treatment that we’re given nowadays is the same old P.T. Barnum as it always was, the same old circus hyperbole that we’ve always had—it’s just in electronic forms now.
“I don’t want any of it to devolve into just pure shock value and gore,” Wilkes adds, “but leave a little mystery, leave a little question mark spiraling at the screen at the end of the movie.”
Wilkes, Robertson, guitarist David Lee and recently added drummer Brett Whitacre plunge listeners into an intense, sensory theater that’s consuming and immediate. On Swampblood—the third in a series of albums channeling a tent revival (Believe), a circus sideshow (Pandelirium) and a graveside service—the band wrings death-fixated, hillbilly R&B grime out of their taut instrumental muscle, ghastly stories, barbed humor, old-time religion and Wilkes’ contorted roaring and sneering.
Through the sinister loping of “The Deadinin’ ” and three tracks of phantasmal buzz, cicada noise, guttural incantations and solitary banjo situated to mirror the passage of an accursed day, Swampblood yanks the listener into the forbidden territory of a haunted Kentucky forest.
“The legend is, if you go in during morning hours, you get lost all day long and are forced to spend the night, because this forest has some sort of enchantment to it,” Wilkes says. “And whenever you emerge from the forest in the morning, you find not a day has passed, but an entire year.
“It’s sort of a vanishing art form of telling stories, oral tradition,” he continues. “It seems like more people are into that confessionary songwriting nowadays. I’d rather talk about things that will stand the test of time beyond trend and ephemera.”
Lest anyone take the Shack Shakers’ pull-no-punches approach to mean that they get their kicks by mocking the degeneracy of Southern religion and culture—or, better yet, that they’re out to do the devil’s work—be assured it’s not that simple.
“Mark opened for the Pope once on World Youth Day in Rome, Italy, in front of 2.5 million people,” says Wilkes. (Robertson previously played bass for Christian rockabilly outfit This Train and late singer-songwriter Rich Mullins’ Ragamuffin Band.) “This band has gospel roots. We’re more riffing on religion than ripping on it. I went to Christian schools, a very uptight sort of Bible Belt upbringing. The rest of the guys in the band are just kind of like Satan-worshipping heathens covered in tattoos. They hate Jesus. I think we’re trapped somewhere in the middle there.”
It makes a difference that Wilkes—as chief songwriter—has an inside knowledge and appreciation of his subject matter. The ultimate aim isn’t disassociation, but total immersion—even to rattle folks a bit.
“Fire-and-Brimstone-style preaching is a thing of the past,” he says. “Now it’s all happy hand-clapping music—‘I’m okay, you’re okay.’ In order to fill the coffers they have to soften the message. They way it used to be was they’d scare the hell out of you to get you into those pews and keep you there. That was a shocking sideshow way of making money and a part of our Americana tradition too. Why does that go away now, because people want everything fed to them in this very easy-to-swallow way? Everything has to be safe and soft and Tempur-Pedic.”
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