Creech Holler Pack More of Their Own Heat on Their Latest, The Shovel and the Gun
by Jewly Hight
Creech Holler began their recording career with a tribute to those who flirt with death through religious snake handling. (The title of their debut, With Signs Following, refers to the kind of rare, rural charismatic churches where rattlers are occasionally whipped out as a demonstration of faith.) With their second album, The Shovel and the Gun, they've moved on to more carnal deathly implements.
Appropriately, the album starts off with a quartet of murder ballads, three of them original. It hardly matters that the sour menace of singer/guitarist Jeff Zentner's vocals is half-muffled by the trio's churning and thrashing and his demon-hornet bottleneck guitar solos. You can still feel the lyrics' threat of final revenge: Surely nothing pleasant can befall "Raymond Lee," "Maggie Rose," "Willie Williams" or "Darlin' Corey" in the foreboding songs bearing their names. And nothing does.
Following those four violent deaths and burials are a couple of songs that warn of ever-present, soul-blackening evil; then more stories of suffering, misery and tragic death to finish out the album. Since Creech Holler's first release, those same kinds of excruciating themes have been at the core of their material. The difference now is that they're relying less on traditionals and Doc Boggs numbers to tell the dark tales and writing more songs themselves.
The band's originals hold up well next to the material they cull from older sources. And when they do play the latter, they tend to leave their own fingerprints anyway. A case in point: Their version of the traditional call-and-response gospel song "John the Revelator" has got to be one of the fiercest and most sinister on record.
Rounded out by drummer Christian Brooks and bassist Joseph Campbell—who both live in Nashville (Zentner used to live here but now makes the commute from Asheville)—Creech Holler smelt the most visceral sonic elements at their disposal into an all-consuming experience born of a darkened vision of the American South.
Like other bands with Southern Gothic leanings that have come before them—not least the Legendary Shack Shakers—they're entranced by what they dig up from and imagine of the South's underbelly and margins. And they have a way of harnessing ugly extremes and smoking out every last trace of sentimentality, making their music hit a whole lot harder than present-day punk. Similar to the fiction of Flannery O'Connor, it's jarring by design, making it hard to tear your eyes and ears away.
There's an undercurrent of hill-country blues in Creech Holler's droning, sinewy guitar and bass licks (the hypnotic "Devil's Eyes" is a good example), and the hulking, militaristic drum cadences bear a distant resemblance to fife-and-drum blues. On a few tracks, mournful fiddle sawing—a welcome new addition since Signs Following—intensifies the Appalachian folk flavor already present in the form of penetrating modal melodies, and serves as an affecting counterpoint to Zenter's clawhammer-style guitar playing.
Zentner, Campbell and Brooks have always attacked their blend of traditional influences with a punishing sort of garage-rock intensity. Their music has never lacked in fervor or confidence, but this time they sound as if they've slipped even further into the dark trance themselves.
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