Murder By Death : Good Morning, Magpie

<img src="http://www.qromag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/murderbydeathgoodmorning.jpg" alt=" " />Murder By Death's latest album<i></i><span style="font-style: normal">, about nature, drinking, growing old, the life of the poor, and even shaving invites the listener into...
8.5 Vagrant
2010 

Murder By Death : Good Morning, Magpie Murder By Death’s latest album, Good Morning, Magpie, about nature, drinking, growing old, the life of the poor, and even shaving invites the listener into a gothic, western American fiction.  The sound and poetry of each song is a stop along that journey.  The title of the album may be a reference to an obscure and unreleased Radiohead tune.  There’s also just the bird called a magpie, and/or it might be a reference to the word’s metaphorical meaning when it is used to describe someone who collects useless things or makes too much idle chatter.  Who knows!  The songs are no great departure from previous albums, but according to Adam Turla, the group’s lead singer and songwriter, “Good Morning, Magpie is some of the darkest and brightest material we have ever written.”

The first track is a thirty-second song called “Kentucky Bourbon”.  It opens the album like an old-timey radio commercial but with a touch of fatalistic sadness.  Immediately following is another alcohol-themed song titled, “As Long As There Is Whiskey In the World”.  It’s in this regular length song that the band’s full sound is first heard, and it’s tasteful and bombastic at all the right times.

In “On the Streets Below”, the verses contain depressing vignettes each about a different girl trying to survive in a cruel, urban underworld.  Musically it reaches into punk/ska territory, but the novelty of it here doesn’t capture the original vitality or reinvent it in any remarkable way.  It’s a pity that the uninspired horn lines during the instrumental choruses must be suffered through when the horn stabs elsewhere elevate the drama of the song so effectively.

“King of the Gutters, Prince of the Dogs” is a melancholy, lone traveler song.  The lowly sovereign character in this song transcends any specific time or place and acts as a universal figure that represents the oppressed and disenfranchised of all eras.  The sound swirls with all the gothic Americana ethos that slide guitar, banjo, piano, drums, and cello can shuffle out.  Halfway through, the beat picks up, the cello finds new purpose, and the story continues until finally the lone traveler speaks to his symbolic identity by saying, “Nothing can touch me / Nothing can touch me / No force, no sound.”

The next track, “Piece by Piece” exudes a bitter and aged wisdom.  The hollering lyric “…You’re still young” fades into solo cello lines between full-band hits of angst.  And, as a fast 6/8 climaxes, it finally releases into a halftime breakdown sustaining an ostinato cello line over changing chords to end with one last reminder that “You’re still young.”  Somehow the condescending lyrics of “Piece by Piece” narrowly escape clichéd self-importance.  That evasion is a testament to the strength of the character pieces that most of Murder by Death’s songs seem to be.  We’re not listening to a righteous Adam Turla tell us what’s what; we’re listening to a character speak with his own arrogance and bitterness.

The simplest of all songs on the album, “Foxglove” tells a love story with all the Americana noir mysticism of the rest of the tracks, but this one is in the form of a simple folk song with short verses and a repetitive refrain.  It starts with a great cello part that starts the groove and gets picked up by the band.  Later the cello adapts to the full band setting by playing higher notes and more percussive rhythms.  After so much dark, obscure poetry, some lighthearted, though still somewhat mysterious, love lyrics are a welcome relief.  This is followed by one of the most ominous tracks on the album, “White Noise”.

This eerie song, with its apocalyptic overtones, has some of the best examples of this band’s musical trademarks.  The vocal performance is passionate and free in its liberties with rhythms, bent notes, and half spoken lines.  The cello is distinctive here as it is in every track, but particularly tasteful in its contributions.  This is also one of the few tracks where the same basic groove is continuous through the whole song.  It’s a feature found in polished, hit songwriting, and in the midst of an album full of tracks that take the rhythmic freedom of abrupt groove shifts quite often, the restraint found here is a confident display of the band’s ability to produce a slick pop-arrangement if and when the band chooses.

The band’s self-described “Americana noir and dramatic post-punk” sound continues to hold up as an accurate description with their latest album Good Morning, Magpie, but it must also be decided that this is a literary band.  Character songs, story songs, philosophical musings – much like Iron and Wine, the lyrics carry a great weight all their own.  Every track on this album has a great deal to offer the attentive listener.

MP3 Stream: “Good Morning, Magpie”

{audio}/mp3/files/Murder By Death – Good Morning Magpie.mp3{/audio}

Categories
Album Reviews
  • Anonymous
    at
  • No Comment

    Leave a Reply

    Album of the Week