Lylas deliver spooky songs for outdoorsy types
by Sean L. Maloney
You can listen to Do You Believe in Blood—the latest album from the criminally underappreciated folk-surrealists Lylas—wherever you want, but until you hit the highway and head for the mountains, you're going to miss the point. This is an album that screams for wide-open spaces, wind in your hair and grand vistas that you just aren't going to find in a cubicle, under the sickly green cast of fluorescent lights and over the well-worn high-traffic carpet.
You can listen to Blood in your bedroom or driving down Gallatin Pike, but you won't be able to resist the urge to get under the stars and out of the smog, maybe find an empty field and start a campfire with your sweetheart—and kill her!
OK, Blood won't drive you to murder, but there is an undertow of menace just beneath the sweet, subdued surface of Lylas' country waltzes. Like a thunderstorm on the horizon throwing bolts of electrified death just out of earshot, there's an air of unease flowing through the string swells of "Halloween, TN" and the title track "Do You Believe in Blood." Suburban strangeness permeates the fingerpicked six-strings and slide guitars where damaged characters wander in a haze of Xanax and misfortune—imagine Canadian auteur Todd Haynes doing a reboot of El Topo in Cannon County and here's your incidental music.
Blood's standout tracks, like "My Sleepwalking Summer" and "Fix Me Dixie," evoke a sense of displacement familiar and foreign simultaneously, of haunted hollers paved to make way for strip malls and Steak 'n Shakes, of ghosts walking cul-de-sacs as the neighborhood kids run home for dinner. Vocalist Kyle Hamlett spins yarns of full moons and "scars and bars of love, love, love" while Kelli Shay Hix's plaintive fiddle belies the fact that everything may not be right in the countryside on the haunting "Call Her Home." When Hamlett pines that "strangles are embraces" and to "stuff her in your southbound suitcase," it's tough to deny the romance of asphyxiation and the horrors of passion—made all the more unsettling by the delicate soundscape and gorgeous chorus it's swathed in.
Do You Believe in Blood walks a thin line between ephemeral beauty and damaged despondency, where emotions are infinitely more complex than the shine on their surface may indicate. "Miss Halloween 1953" may seem like a softly strummed walk down memory lane, but blood-soaked bouquets are not the stuff of Norman Rockwell and misty-eyed Americana. Sure, the protagonist "fell in love and stayed there," but is that because he's "embalmed and calmed"?
What is more wrenching: the pain of love or the pain of death? Are we mourning the loss of innocence or the loss of life? This is the tension at the heart of Blood, and this is why, in their understated way, Lylas are one of the most engaging bands in the city.
Email music@nashvillescene.com.
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