Over a span
of almost 15 years, Murder by Death has amassed a rabid, cult-like following of
fans by adhering to an unrivaled genre-defying sound and brandishing a workmanlike
attitude in an ever-changing industry. With their new album, Big Dark Love, the band (Adam Turla,
Sarah Balliet, Matt Armstrong, Dagan Thogerson, David Fountain), newly housed
in Louisville, KY after more than a decade rooted in Bloomington, IN, dazzles
from start to finish through ten variations of non-traditional (hey, this is
Murder by Death) love songs on the strength of vocalist/chief lyricist Adam
Turla’s gritty narrative voice and MBD’s seemingly inexhaustible knack for
fashioning captivating arrangements that high-wire waltz between menace and
elegance. It’s a balancing act that few bands ever get right, but Murder by
Death have carved an impressive career out of this very dance, and they’ve
thrown some psych, synth, and string rumblings into the mix to boot.
Perhaps,
MBD’s greatest strength has always been their ability to marry Turla’s chilling
lyrical imagery with an ornately portentous atmosphere that feels present and
alive. The musical outcome almost seems akin to having the talent to intertwine
evocative poetry and prose and then surrounding all the words with a production
design and cinematography that could rival a bastard child of Kubrick and
Hitchcock. A shining example here is the title track, which opens with the
protagonist, alone, bored and stricken with the bends, spitting out a window,
chuckling when it hits someone, and then pleading with a lover to allow him
inside when he darkens the door. “LET ME IN!” Turla bellows again and again,
the band swelling to a torrential chorus, “LET ME IN! Me and my big dark love.”
By this point, it’s obvious these aren’t your typical radio love songs, but
they’re fascinating meditations on the spectrum of love in the Murder by Death
realm in many of the same ways Nick Cave has enjoyed a 30-year-plus career
pitting non-traditional gothic love songs against murder ballads. As with most
of Murder by Death’s unassailable discography, Cave helped pave the crooked
path, and MBD is carrying the crackling torch through new terrain and to
younger audiences, putting their own spin on what resonates like vivid American
folklore.
The lovely
first single, “Strange Eyes,” touches on the feeling of giving into someone
with an unsettling power over you, as potentially dangerous as it may be in the
long run. “Dream in Red” is an eerie, open-ended musing upon how to react when
one believes he sees his lover hauling a body down by a river. The gorgeous
ballad “Send Me Home” is a soulful plea for a new beginning during hard times,
even if that new beginning is a loving burial in a nondescript pine box. The
banjo-and-cello-powered “Last Thing” grapples with the dramatic weight of
actively loving someone while in the depressing grip of an unrepentant winter.
Turla sings, “It feels like the snow will bury us. I don’t wanna be cold. I
just don’t wanna be another chore, some wounded bird to care for, an unrewarded
job for you. That’s the last thing I wanna do.” That’s love in a nutshell, even
if it’s sometimes tough to swallow. As is the overprotective parental love of
“Natural Pearl,” a swift, stomping, steel-driven number begging the child “not
to leave our little world.” Closing track “Hunted” rouses up serious Morricone
spirits over a sprawling soundscape as Turla sings, “We don’t know what it’s
like to be hunted. We don’t know what it’s like to be wanted too much.” It’s
fitting then that “Hunted” bookends Big
Dark Love, while the progressively momentous “I Shot an Arrow” opens the
album in off-kilter, grand and altogether jaw-dropping fashion. Complete with a
startlingly heavy rhythm up front, deftly shifting time signatures, Balliet’s
sweeping cello, keys, horns and Turla’s shouts of “get me out of here,” the
song escalates, swoons, and then re-escalates all the way until the whole
composition boils into combustible, deafening chaos fronted by the screamed
mantra “I shot an arrow!” before the reprieve of a piano coda gives way into a
post-apocalyptic static.
Certain
critics may contend Murder by Death are resting on the laurels of a formula
they’ve used for six preceding full-length albums and several EPs. They would
be missing the heart of the matter. Murder by Death have long forged a sound
that is unmistakably theirs, and the musicianship and themes they wield leaves
them with hardly any contemporaries to rival the land they have staked. As the
band proves on Big Dark Love, there’s
no need to contaminate a formula when you’ve pretty much perfected it.
Big Dark
Love is out February 3, 2015 via Bloodshot Records.
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