Revisited: Crooked Fingers, Red Devil Dawn
November 18th, 2009 by Gabe Vodicka in Music news, RevisitedOriginal release date: Jan. 21, 2003
One-time Georgia boy and former Archers of Loaf frontman Eric Bachmann has a one-of-a-kind voice. On the best moments of Red Devil Dawn, the second album from Bachmann’s Crooked Fingers, his voice soothes like a sedated Tom Waits; on those few cringe-worthier ones he channels Cookie Monster on an oatmeal raisin binge. Thankfully, those latter moments come few and far between. Red Devil Dawn is one of those records which incongruously pairs music and lyrics to great effect — the instrumentation heard here is upbeat, lavish, even orchestral at times, but Bachmann’s lyrics serve to contrast. The sparse “Bad Man Coming” warns of some sort of impending doom, but manages to sound like a love song; “Big Darkness” prays for change in a dying “town where nothing moves,” where “even the vultures have moved on.”
Of course, Red Devil Dawn contains its fair share of actual love songs, and the better ones are simply outstanding. “You Can Never Leave,” despite its creepy title (what gives, Bachmann?), contains some beautiful lines. “You are no father’s daughter,” Bachmann croons. “No man has this much to offer.” And later, it becomes “You are fire, you are water/ When you dance, it is torture.” Further along in the album, though, that love turns to inevitable bitterness, and on the bouncy, horn-kissed “You Threw a Spark,” all that earlier adoration has become accusation and resentment. “So don’t you go claiming that I did you wrong,” Cookie Mon- er, Bachmann, spits, “When you were the one doing nothing at all.”
All this talk about the lyrics on Red Devil Dawn serves to illustrate just how prominent an aspect of the album they actually are. It is almost unusual, it seems, in an age of no-fi and shitgaze, to hear an album where the lyrics can be so clearly heard and (somewhat) understood. Crooked Fingers always kind of seemed to make music for a different time; a time, perhaps, of the Leonard Cohens and the Nebraskas, music that wore its crumbling heart on its tattered sleeve and whose vocals stood defiantly front-and-center. Of course, music like that still exists, but it’s mostly the kind of silly Dashboard Confessional tripe we call “emo,” music devoid of any toughness or resilience at all. Bachmann, on Red Devil Dawn, is nothing if not tough.
November 19th, 2009 at 10:15 am
Great record to revisit, though I prefer their self-titled.