At first, it sounds a little like Leadbelly or Son House. The recording is grainy, warbled, soaked in tape hiss. There are a few flubbed notes here and there. This is obviously one-take material, but played by someone with a fair handle on the guitar. The vocals seem off-the-cuff, driven by stream of consciousness, and maybe slightly drunken. With no background information on the album, one’s first guess was that this was a lost recording of some lesser-known Delta blues musician. But then comes “Gas Chamber”, which bares some mildly apocalyptic warning of living in a dying atmosphere, and then veers off into a seemingly impromptu spoken word breakdown loosely pertaining to environmentalism. This was either some very progressive tent revival stuff, or this is much more modern than the recording quality suggests.
Grant Brissey covered everything from hard news and technology, to music, film, and visual arts during his time working for The Stranger. Grant's work has also appeared at Geekwire, and in Billboard,... More by Grant Brissey