Reverend Glasseye and His Wooden Legs
Black River Falls

A dark-folk of rare beauty, an old-time goth-country, experimental alt-country: call it what you will, this "Black River Falls" (Coo-Coo-Birds, 2001), an album where the air of old, dusty taverns, second-rate whiskey, underarm exhalations and the foul breath of a crowd of drunken Yankees can be felt. Scents that seem to us on par with the most prestigious perfume if they are accompanied by these visceral muzak, dirty and muddy, amidst mazurkas, crooked country westerns, rockabilly excursions and European folk influences alias klezmer pranks and gypsy gallops, the latter so heartfelt, rural, and passionate as to rival the more seasoned gypsy ensembles of old Yugoslavia. 

An all-American affair nonetheless that of Reverend Glasseye and his Wooden Legs, indeed probably the most American album I have ever heard, stuff that makes Springsteen and Dylan seem like Neapolitan neomelodic in comparison. The key word is Dark Cabaret, an almost marginal movement in the market with many deserving bands (Dirty Granny Tales, The Deadfly Ensemble, Circus Contraption - and if you will, even the latest discussed and disavowed works of our own Spiritual Front - those in my opinion most noteworthy, although all quite different from each other). Standing out among the delightful and rich arrangements, the brass, banjo, organs, and swing rhythms that the Denver band dishes out is undoubtedly the voice of Adam Glasseye, with his hoarse, intense, vibrato, and baritone timbre, as regular and precise as a Swiss watch in delivering deep interpretations, as well as a stage presence more unique than rare, even when, as on "50% Murder" and "3 Ton Chain", he is joined by the equally smoky, deviant, and fascinating voice of Wendy Emerson, a sort of female reincarnation of Tom Waits who in her sporadic appearance - she will mainly handle vibraphones and piano - will do her best to get noticed, though never reaching the feats of the reverend. A reverend who reaches his peaks in the morbid country of "Penitentiary Highball" (beautiful arrangement with guitar slides skillfully suspended between Hawaiian and Western tradition), "Midnight Cabaret" (Gogol Bordello more sober than usual), the splendid "Seven Little Girls" (strange echoes of psychobilly-rooted sounds, excelled at the end in an off-key lament that is surreal, bringing to mind the craziest Sun City Girls as well as the exploits of the legendary Mariottide) but above all the grandiose "Carnival of Pills" where, having momentarily abandoned the rotten and cabaret tones, he offers a performance like a seasoned minstrel, between Nick Cave and David Eugene Edwards, intense, fiery and with a taste for homemade, naive, true lo-fi, no space for pose-indie sounds and studied yet cloying press-photos.

Reverend Glasseye is ultimately a loser, the anti-star par excellence, someone with a such a poor image that makes the extras of female-fronted bands with super-hotties in tow seem like David Bowie, but creator of truly perfect and classy music. Well, not really.