Crooked Fingers – Red Devil Dawn
Eric Bachmann, who led North Carolina indie-rockers Archers Of Loaf throughout the ’90s, took a turn from insouciant noise-pop to melancholy when he initiated Crooked Fingers in 2000. Red Devil Dawn, the third Crooked Fingers album, continues that mode — but this time around there’s also a surprising levity at work, with the tunes coming off like sun-kissed elegies.
“There is a town where nothing moves/Nobody works and nobody plays/All of their dreams have melted away,” intones Bachmann in his sackcloth rasp on the opener “Big Darkness”. The bright, wheeling music — dotted with chipper electronic chime and faint, snappy drum loop — tells a different story, however, as the song breathlessly builds and sweet strings underpin Bachmann’s grim sentiments. This is the euphoria of despair; whether it’s acceptance or utter hopelessness is anyone’s guess, but it sure is pretty.
Glancing through the lyrics, all desperate circumstances and inky figures, is like turning over a rock in a wet garden, but the songs themselves have a come-hither beauty fleshed out by violin, cello and trumpet. In fact, Bachmann often sounds like he’s having a lot fun, especially when vamping (uncannily dead-on) Neil Diamond on the mariachi-sodden “Sweet Marie” (though Diamond has surely never delivered a sentiment like “Drinking sparkling wine and sniffing glue/I’ve been looking for some soft abuse”). Bachmann doesn’t get bogged down by melancholy; he just weaves it into swooning tunes.