Deer Tick – The Black Dirt Sessions

Album Review by Mark Holland | 23 Jun 2010
Album title: The Black Dirt Sessions
Artist: Deer Tick
Label: Fargo
Release date: 5 Jul

Like all true country musicians, Deer Tick’s John McCauley shares his name with his father and grandfather, has an unfashionable moustache and sounds as though he swallowed a cactus as a child. The Black Dirt Sessions isn’t one for fans of Dolly Parton though; the whole thing is pretty bleak, almost comedically so. It’s not that the LP's failure to vary in mood from song to song is condemnable in principle, rather the lyrics lack the clarity of imagery necessary to give the bleakness any sort of novelty; eventually it just becomes words. The same could be said about the music, though the essentially mid-tempo (albeit dirty) Americana is interspersed with moments of genuine intrigue, especially Mange, whose irregular beat collapses pleasingly into proper bar brawl honky-tonk and there’s nobody singing about loneliness. What the Rhode Islanders do they do well, but it might be nice to hear them do something different, badly. [Mark Holland]

 

http://www.deertickmusic.com