Any album that sounds as though everybody involved remembered to wipe their feet before entering the studio should probably be regarded with suspicion. Fortunately, Wailin Storms’ The Arsonist sounds more like four people discovered a door already hanging crooked from its hinges and decided the sensible course was to make the room less structurally sound.
The Durham band carries the American South around like a family curse, hauling blues, gothic rock, punk, doom, Baptist hymns and old folk dread into the same cramped quarters. Their fifth album, and first for Season of Mist, was recorded fully analogue by Matt Talbott of Hum, an appropriate choice for music that benefits from scraped edges and human error. Justin Storms wanted portions of the record to reconnect with the primitive four-track character of the band’s beginnings. “Some of these songs are more primitive and stripped down, hearkening back to the four-track recordings that the band started with,” says Storms. “The recordings contain flaws, but remain human in all the right ways. They could be a murder ballad or an old folk song that’s sung around the campfire.”
Standout track Dead End provides an appropriately diseased introduction. Ben Melton’s guitar worries at Steve Stanczyk’s bass while Mark Oates pounds out a rhythm that seems increasingly annoyed about being alive. There is some Radiohead in its queasy grandeur, the poetic ecstasy of The Doors’ Jim Morrison, and plenty of The Gun Club in its bloodshot blues logic. Then Storms sings “Calm night / Birds keep plucking out our eyes” with the casual authority of a man reporting local traffic conditions.
Fire has followed Storms since childhood, when his fascination with flames nearly resulted in the destruction of his family home. Here it becomes appetite, catastrophe, sex, faith and bad judgment sharing one cigarette. Flannery O’Connor would recognize the neighborhood immediately: everybody has dressed for church, salvation is theoretically available, and somebody somewhere has misplaced a can of gasoline.
You Never Answered turns the miserable modern habit of staring into a phone into a deafening plea for actual contact. Elsewhere, war and ordinary social machinery feed the record’s agitation before the title track slows everything into a bruised procession. Love suddenly becomes another uncontrollable force capable of rearranging a life without requesting permission. Never Rest swells into a crescendo of horror as it unfurls a wild torrent of haunting poetry set against apocalyptic guitars and thundering drums – landing somewhere between Type O Negative and The Doors.
The Arsonist finds Wailin Storms standing dangerously close to their oldest impulses: primitive rock & roll, folk horror, damaged romance and the suspicion that salvation and catastrophe may share an address.
Listen to The Arsonist below and order the album here.
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The post Like Murder Ballads and Campfire Folk Songs — Southern Gothic Outfit Wailin Storms Ignites With “The Arsonist” LP appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
