Introducing The Benedictions
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The Benedictions shared ears with The Devil, My Pocket and Detroit Rebellion last night at AS220 in ...The Benedictions shared ears with The Devil, My Pocket and Detroit Rebellion last night at AS220 in the band�s maiden voyage.
AS220 billed the event as country and western music. While The Benedictions are certainly an Americana band, they�re not an Americana act in quite the same style as DR or TDMP. They�re much heavier, with electric guitars and bass, a full kit, and a number of tunes, such as the blistering Ghost Train and last night�s full thunder closer, The Light at the End of the Tunnel, that are straight hard rock, if there's such a thing. Of course, that�s still Americana. But some folks may have been surprised by The Benedictions last night.
Then again, The Low Anthem, with Elvis Perkins and Deer Tick worked pretty well last month at Lupo's. An even better example is TLA, The Accident that Led Me to the World, and Badman at Firehouse a couple of months back. Badman played late night, with a menacing severity, like a pillar of razor wires, that may have lost something had it been paired with more similar acts. Badman shows us something in Americana: A sort of surface tension, a wild flame of urgency, a sound like a snake under a boot, or like a riot of grinding teeth. Americana isn't all community dances, worksongs, and porches along Lake Pontchartrain: There's a riot going on, a dream deferred, cities simmering in the hot sun of sin and loss; Americana doesn't belong just to Yazoo City and Culver City and Kansas City, it also belongs to New York City, Jersey City and adversity.
That night at Firehouse 13 was the night The Benedictions met. They had each responded to an ad placed on Craigslist, and arranged to meet where they would be inspired.
There must have been something there that night at Firehouse 13, and in the months since. There was something there when bassist Rob Schadt and guitarist Kelly Burke backed up frontman G.W. Mercure�s solo gig at The Brooklyn Coffee and Tea House a short while later, and there was something there last night.
Every musician visualizes something; a distinct and particular sound that is clear in his or her mind and that can be impossible, or merely very difficult, to realize. You get the feeling that The Benedictions are realized, as there sound is so deliberate: a muscular, ragged evocation of a forgotten, even abandoned side of Americana. A purer, truer form of what passes for garage rock these days, integrating the energy that attracts so many young people to music with the community of forms that defines folk, blues, and country. It's hard folk, hard blues, hard country, but with the arcane iconography that litters most Americana these days jettisoned. That iconography, so agrarian, antiquated, is not their reality. It's not anybody's reality anymore, really. Maybe it was Woody Guthrie's reality, maybe it was Muddy Waters' reality. The landscape of The Benedictions' music is urban. It's solitude, doubt, doom, hope, badly ventilated apartments, automobiles, the last threads of myth blowing down early morning streets, barrooms, bar bands, cities destroyed by floods...Where overdeveloped skyline�s are escaped in favor of a desiccated landscape that is turned to not for its rugged beauty, but for its solitude. The trains are ghosts, the land is barren and forgotten, even desolate border towns ring not with tumbleweeds and dust, but with distant wars, the shivers of memory, and darkness.
No one can tell The Benedictions that Reverend Gary Davis is Americana and Guns N' Roses isn't; if The Band is Americana, then so is Ronnie Hawkins, and then so is Elvis, so is Chuck Berry, so is Jerry Lee Lewis, so is Mike Bloomfield. So is Led Zeppelin. The Band may have been Canadian and Zep may have been Brits, but they were playing American music. And so are The Benedictions
