Here on Scratched Into Our Souls, I'm not going focus necessarily on the newest music or the latest-breaking news—there are plenty of great music blogs out there that already do that (like Stereogum and My Old Kentucky Blog), and the world doesn't really need another. Besides, I did my time covering music news for MTV a few years back, and while it has its appeal (I mean, who doesn't like to be the first to post a new song or information?), it's not a game I'm terribly interested in playing anymore.
Instead, I'll be writing about and posting whatever strikes my fancy, regardless of when it first came out. And so, with apologies to my friend Dave Marsh, who used to have a regular feature called "My Obsession" on his Kick Out the Jams show on Sirius satellite radio (Sunday mornings, 10 a.m. to noon ET), I'm introducing This Week's Obsession, in which I'll share a song or book or album or painting that I simply can't get out of my head right now, or that over the years comes back again and again to haunt me in ways that go beyond rational explanation.
This week, it's the song "Black River Killer" from Blitzen Trapper's 2008 Furr. To be honest, the band's previous album, 2007's Wild Mountain Nation, didn't do much for me—too much self-conscious eclecticism, not enough attention to melody and songcraft—so I never bothered to check out Furr. And when "Black River Killer" came on Sirius last week, my initial response was "Oh, great, another alt-country murder ballad." And it is, but it steers clear of cliches both lyrically (the murder happens on Sunset Strip, not back up in the holler) and musically (it's a mostly acoustic shuffle, but the whistling synthesizer links it not to some stereotypical version of, as Greil Marcus called it, "that Old Weird America" but to 2Pac). The rest of Furr is pretty damned good, but "Black River Killer" is one for the ages.
Check it out:
Yes, that synth melody is so key! I love it, and I had thought the same thing when I first heard it: "Are they sampling 'Nuthin but a G Thang'?" It's not quite, but that's definitely what it calls to mind. I also really like the title track.
Posted by: Joe | February 09, 2009 at 01:28 PM
Digging it - if Cake, Tom Petty, & the V-Roys had a love child, this would be its theme song.
Consider my soul scratched...
Posted by: Jose Castillo | February 09, 2009 at 02:40 PM
. . . and the love child would've dated Waylon's son, Shooter. So is this synth riff the new steel guitar solo?
Lyrically, it reminds me of a cross between Desperado, I Fought the Law and the ballad "too old to work, too young to die".
Posted by: Tim Siglin | February 10, 2009 at 08:51 AM