Music with Kurt: New Songs for Old Wars, by Kurt Gottschalk

Siouxsie and the Banshees released their second record in 1979, after a quick rush to fame and acclaim (in England, anyway) with their first single and debut album the previous year. Join Hands didn’t do much to capitalize on earlier success. The album was tense, unhinged, unnerving, built from the unexpected inspiration of the first world war and informed by military aggressions of the current day. Unlike some of the group’s albums, Join Hands hasn’t aged, in sound or lyrics.

Off Black, the second album by Bare Wire Son, brings that Banshee classic to mind. It doesn’t much sound like Join Hands. Siouxsie Sioux’s backing band had a huge sound, but it was just three people plus some effect pedals and overdubbing. Olin Janusz’s band for Black Out includes three additional vocalists, two guitarists (one playing lap steel), cello, piano and drums, in addition to his own guitar, bass, mandolin, organ and synthesizers. He also employs someone for support and emotional maintenance, whom one would hope was well compensated because the album is an emotional dredging.

The British-born Janusz wrote the album while living in Poland, basing much of it on diaries of mothers whose sons were fighting in World War I. (The journals of German expressionist artist Käthe Kollwitzn, whose work graces the cover, provided further source materials.) Like Join Hands, Off Black isn’t a period piece. Neither album sounds quite like something of its own time or of the period it concerns. In that regard, the albums are more like movies, aiming to conjure a feeling, to plunge the listener into the darkness of war rather than depict it in any literal way. Lyrically, the albums address their subjects only passingly. They’re not documentaries or history lessons, they’re sequences of scenes, and they’re both decidedly bleak.

Off Black is certainly dark and moody. Through gradual, orchestral swells and creeping guitar riffs—mastered like a cut diamond by Doug Henderson, who has added sheen to the sound of Swans, Metallic Falcons and the Necks—Janusz emits grim poetics (“put your sorrow in the bellows,” “these trenches run hollow with the crow”) from a voice buried deep in his throat. But it’s not altogether a funeral dirge. Occasionally a slow groove will drag itself to the surface, almost like an accidental Dirty Three song. Those moments don’t last long, but they do provide a few moments to breathe during what is an otherwise beautifully mournful album. It’s streaming in full on Bandcamp and other platforms as of May 14 and is available for download or on cassette (in an edition of 33) through the Russian label Sination.

Share:

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Comments are closed.

READ OUR FULL PRINT EDITION

Our Sister Publication

a word from our sponsors!

Latest Media Guide!

Where to find the Star-Revue

Instagram

How many have visited our site?

wordpress hit counter

Social Media

Most Popular

On Key

Related Posts

Film: “Union” documents SI union organizers vs. Amazon, by Dante A. Ciampaglia

Our tech-dominated society is generous with its glimpses of dystopia. But there’s something especially chilling about the captive audience meetings in the documentary Union, which screened at the New York Film Festival and is currently playing at IFC Center. Chronicling the fight of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), led by Chris Smalls, to organize the Amazon fulfillment warehouse in Staten

An ode to the bar at the edge of the world, review by Oscar Fock

It smells like harbor, I thought as I walked out to the end of the pier to which the barge now known as the Waterfront Museum was docked. Unmistakable were they, even for someone like me — maybe particularly for someone like me, who’s always lived far enough from the ocean to never get used to its sensory impressions, but

Quinn on Books: In Search of Lost Time

Review of “Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance,” by Kevin Brown Review by Michael Quinn   “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” – Countée Cullen, “Yet Do I Marvel” Come Thanksgiving, thoughts naturally turn to family and the communities that shape us. Kevin Brown’s “Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance” is a

MUSIC: Wiggly Air, by Kurt Gottschalk

Mothers of reinvention. “It’s never too late to be what you might have been,” according to writer George Eliot, who spoke from experience. Born in the UK in 1819, Mary Ann Evans found her audience using the masculine pen name in order to avoid the scrutiny of the patriarchal literati. Reinvention, of style if not self, is in the air